Mette Bech Risør
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 145997 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mette Bech Risør |
| NOMBRES | Mette Bech |
| APELLIDO | Risør |
| FIRMA | RISØR M B |
| AFILIACIONES | UiT The Arctic University of Norway |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7912-5804 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 69 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Configuring symptoms
This article explores the introduction of the internet-based self-help programme “My Symptoms” into Danish general practice. The programme aims to assist patients and general practitioners (GPs) in managing persistent physical symptoms (PPS) such as pain, fatigue, gut trouble, and dizziness. These symptoms affect a significant part of the population, yet they are rarely explained by a pathophysiological diagnosis. The article is based on ethnogra…
Well-being in a productive world
We explore how Norwegian students understand and cope with mental health and well-being challenges in higher education. We use innovative visual collaborative methodology with a critical approach to well-being, drawing on a sociology of world relations. Our findings add insights into students’ perspectives in a field largely informed by quantitative data. They illustrate the extent of students’ active self-management of emotional, temporal and re…
People on long-term sickness absence and their experiences and perceptions of professionals from the vocational and the health care sector
People on long-term sickness absence in Denmark experience the help and support they receive from professionals as problematic. To understand these issues, this study, through interviews with eight interlocutors, investigated how people on long-term sickness absence perceive and experience professionals from both the vocational and health care sectors involved in their situation. Our study led to two main findings: Firstly, the roles of professio…
Healthcare seeking for people diagnosed with severe mental illness
For people with mental and somatic illnesses, the interpretive process of attending to a multitude of bodily sensations and recognising them as potential symptoms represents daily and 'chronic homework'. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this study explores diagnostic work and healthcare seeking among people with severe mental and somatic illnesses. As multiple studies have shown, the transformation process for a perceived …
Rethinking the logic of early diagnosis in cancer
To reduce morbidity and mortality of cancer, more countries have implemented strategies to detect cancer, based on the logic of 'the sooner the better'. Time is thereby an essential component in how cancer research, policies, and prevention are practiced today. Where the logic of early diagnosis benefits some, the logic also produces harms. In this article, we use a cross-disciplinary case-study design to discuss how different notions of time and…
Affective Processes and the Diagnosing of Chronic Fatigue
In this article, Risør and Nissen are dedicated to examining the assessment of chronic fatigue and clinical encounters in a clinic in Norway. We particularly attend to affects, which drive the setting of diagnosis and care. In our analysis, intensities, affective attunements, and atmospheres determine the course of the consultations and play a decisive role in enacting the relational encounters. We suggest that affectivity clarifies that being "u…
Expanding Medical Semiotics
This special issue explores the evolving landscape of medical semiotics of conventional biomedicine. With expansion we refer to the range of phenomena considered signs or symptoms of underlying disease, but also the growing anthropological attention to the medical sign system in ways which reach beyond classic semiotic analysis. The articles testify to the expansion in terms of empirical foci and theoretical contributions. As part of the introduc…
Senses of Touch
Managing persistent physical symptoms when being social and active is the norm
PPS shaped the participants' sense of how to act towards their bodies and social relationships in interaction with societal norms. The participants' subject formation and symptom experiences should thus be seen as a biosocial process
Luckily-I am not the worrying kind
In Denmark, due to the implementation of the Non-specific Symptoms and Signs of Cancer-Cancer Patient Pathway (NSSC-CPP), more people with symptoms such as fatigue and weight loss are informed that their symptoms might indicate cancer and they are referred to the pathway. But what do patients in the NSSC-CPP experience, in particular, with respect to being in an affective state of anticipation of a cancer diagnosis? We conducted participant obser…
How life events are perceived to link to bodily distress
Chronic pelvic pain (CPP) is highly prevalent among women and the condition is poorly understood. In addition to multiple symptoms from the pelvis, CPP patients frequently suffer bodily distress like musculoskeletal pain and negative emotional, behavioral, and sexual implications. This paper is based on a qualitative study including semi-structured interviews with eight women with CPP. Our project has been conducted within the framework of phenom…
Responsibilities of Risk
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark introduced repeated lock-downs of society, including outreach services and visits from social workers for people living with mental illnesses. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in this article we explore how people with mental illness react to and manage their lives amid COVID-19 mitigations, focusing on how they experience and negotiate vulnerability at personal and community level. We argue, that the subj…
Caught up in Care
Patients with chronic fatigue receive advice to improve symptom management and well-being. This advice is based on ideas of self-management and is conveyed during clinical assessment as "activity regulation." Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a hospital clinic in Norway, we show how these patients attempt to demonstrate their competences and everyday concerns, and how the ideology of self-management frames the hope for recovery and crafts a subj…
Fixing my life
Little is known about the perspectives of young people suffering from medically unexplained symptoms. This study aims to explore the experiences and strategies of young Norwegians related to incipient and persistent health complaints affecting everyday life functioning. The study draws on field notes, video material and interview transcripts from a multi-sited ethnographic study of healthcare services and select schools in a small Norwegian town …
Not a film about my slackness
Persistent medically unexplained symptoms have debilitating consequences for adolescents, dramatically altering their social world and future aspirations. Few studies have focused on social and moral aspects of illness experience relevant to adolescents. In this study, the aim is to explore these aspects in depth by focusing on a single case and to address how young people attempt to create social accountability in a search for meaning when facin…
Am I fine
Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. This essential vulnerability calls forth processes of meaning making, of grappling with uncertainty and morality. In this article we explore the uncertainty and ambiguity that exists in the space between bodily sensations and symptoms of illness. Bodily sensations have the potential to become symptoms of disease or to be absorbed into ordinariness, pr…
Careful expressions of social aspects
Persistent health complaints pose communicative dilemmas in care encounters, adversely affecting patient experiences and pathways. Little is known about the impact and role of professionals in encounters with young people with incipient, debilitating, and persistent symptoms. This study aims to explore communicative dilemmas and the role of language in care provided by local professionals in high school settings, municipal services, and general p…
The cancer may come back
Little is known about how people living in the aftermath of cancer treatment experience and manage worries about possible signs of cancer relapse, not as an individual enterprise but as socially embedded management. One-year ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a coastal village of under 3000 inhabitants in northern Norway. Ten villagers who had undergone cancer treatment from six months to five years earlier were the main informants. During f…
Cancer-before-cancer
Approaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines what cancer is and how cancer-related potentialities are enacted and embodied in the context of contemporary regimes of anticipation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban Danish middle-class community among people who were not immediately afflicted by cancer, we describe different and paradoxical cancer mythologies and show how they provide …
Ignoring Symptoms
This article explores the process of interpreting bodily sensations after completed cancer treatment. We base our analysis on repeated interviews over a period of 12 months with eight participants who had different cancer diagnoses. By using the concepts of 'sensation schemas' and 'sensation scripts', we explore how sensation schemas of cancer dominated in the first period, while schemas of late effects and reduced tolerance for daily life activi…
Approaching Health in Landscapes
Chronic cancer patients (CCPs) pay attention and act in response to diverse bodily sensations they experience in everyday life after a cancer episode. Here, we analyse how North Norwegian CCPs use their familiar surroundings in an effort to counter bad mood, anxiety and symptoms of relapse and to strengthen their health. The core participants of the anthropological fieldwork over the course of one year were 10 CCPs from a small coastal village in…
Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Anthropology in Action. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Andersen, R.S., Nichter, M. & Risor, M.B. (2017). Introduction. Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking. Anthropology in Action. 24(1), 1-5 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2017.240101
"Resisting "Reason
Social differences in health and illness are well documented in Denmark. However, little is known about how health practices are manifested in the everyday lives of different social classes. We propose acts of resistance and formation of health subjectivities as helpful concepts to develop our understanding of how dominant health discourses are appropriated by different social classes and transformed into different practices promoting health and …
Sharing or not sharing? Balancing uncertainties after cancer in urban Norway
In this article we explore the uncertainties of living in the aftermath of cancer treatment within the context of the Norwegian welfare state. Serious illnesses confront people with the uncertainty of life itself. We suggest that managing this form of existential uncertainty is inherently a social process and their considerations of whether or not to share worries are part of the everyday management of social relationships. We refer to this proce…
What doyouthink?' the collaborative practices of choice and care in a Danish obstetric ultrasound unit
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork at an obstetric ultrasound unit in Denmark and explores the few, intense minutes of clinical interaction following a high-risk screening result for Down's syndrome. The category of high-risk transforms the routine ultrasound into a situation of inescapable choice, where the health of the foetus is questioned and decisions must be made. The clinical interactions following a high-risk result are investi…
Illness explanations among patients with medically unexplained symptoms
Patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are often considered to be strictly confined to thinking about their symptoms as having only a physical etiology. However, several studies have shown, that the patients also apply other explanations for their sufferings. The aim of this study is to analyse the social construction of illness explanations among patients with MUS, and to illustrate the use of explanatory idioms as being dependent on…
Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Anthropology in Action. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Andersen, R.S., Nichter, M. & Risor, M.B. (2017). Introduction. Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking. Anthropology in Action. 24(1), 1-5 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2017.240101
The importance of contextualization. Anthropological reflections on descriptive analysis, its limitations and implications
This paper regards a concern for the quality of analyses made on the basis of qualitative interviews in some parts of qualitative health research. Starting with discussions departing in discussions on studies exploring 'patient delay' in healthcare seeking, it is argued that an implicit and simplified notion of causality impedes reflexivity on social context, on the nature of verbal statements and on the situatedness of the interview encounter. F…
"Resisting "Reason
Social differences in health and illness are well documented in Denmark. However, little is known about how health practices are manifested in the everyday lives of different social classes. We propose acts of resistance and formation of health subjectivities as helpful concepts to develop our understanding of how dominant health discourses are appropriated by different social classes and transformed into different practices promoting health and …
Cancer-before-cancer
Approaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines what cancer is and how cancer-related potentialities are enacted and embodied in the context of contemporary regimes of anticipation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban Danish middle-class community among people who were not immediately afflicted by cancer, we describe different and paradoxical cancer mythologies and show how they provide …
Class, Social Suffering, and Health Consumerism
In recent years an extensive social gradient in cancer outcome has attracted much attention, with late diagnosis proposed as one important reason for this. Whereas earlier research has investigated health care seeking among cancer patients, these social differences may be better understood by looking at health care seeking practices among people who are not diagnosed with cancer. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among two different soc…
Caught up in Care
Patients with chronic fatigue receive advice to improve symptom management and well-being. This advice is based on ideas of self-management and is conveyed during clinical assessment as "activity regulation." Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a hospital clinic in Norway, we show how these patients attempt to demonstrate their competences and everyday concerns, and how the ideology of self-management frames the hope for recovery and crafts a subj…
Am I fine
Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. This essential vulnerability calls forth processes of meaning making, of grappling with uncertainty and morality. In this article we explore the uncertainty and ambiguity that exists in the space between bodily sensations and symptoms of illness. Bodily sensations have the potential to become symptoms of disease or to be absorbed into ordinariness, pr…
Responsibilities of Risk
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark introduced repeated lock-downs of society, including outreach services and visits from social workers for people living with mental illnesses. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in this article we explore how people with mental illness react to and manage their lives amid COVID-19 mitigations, focusing on how they experience and negotiate vulnerability at personal and community level. We argue, that the subj…
The cancer may come back
Little is known about how people living in the aftermath of cancer treatment experience and manage worries about possible signs of cancer relapse, not as an individual enterprise but as socially embedded management. One-year ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a coastal village of under 3000 inhabitants in northern Norway. Ten villagers who had undergone cancer treatment from six months to five years earlier were the main informants. During f…
Ignoring Symptoms
This article explores the process of interpreting bodily sensations after completed cancer treatment. We base our analysis on repeated interviews over a period of 12 months with eight participants who had different cancer diagnoses. By using the concepts of 'sensation schemas' and 'sensation scripts', we explore how sensation schemas of cancer dominated in the first period, while schemas of late effects and reduced tolerance for daily life activi…
Rethinking the logic of early diagnosis in cancer
To reduce morbidity and mortality of cancer, more countries have implemented strategies to detect cancer, based on the logic of 'the sooner the better'. Time is thereby an essential component in how cancer research, policies, and prevention are practiced today. Where the logic of early diagnosis benefits some, the logic also produces harms. In this article, we use a cross-disciplinary case-study design to discuss how different notions of time and…
Expanding Medical Semiotics
This special issue explores the evolving landscape of medical semiotics of conventional biomedicine. With expansion we refer to the range of phenomena considered signs or symptoms of underlying disease, but also the growing anthropological attention to the medical sign system in ways which reach beyond classic semiotic analysis. The articles testify to the expansion in terms of empirical foci and theoretical contributions. As part of the introduc…
Luckily-I am not the worrying kind
In Denmark, due to the implementation of the Non-specific Symptoms and Signs of Cancer-Cancer Patient Pathway (NSSC-CPP), more people with symptoms such as fatigue and weight loss are informed that their symptoms might indicate cancer and they are referred to the pathway. But what do patients in the NSSC-CPP experience, in particular, with respect to being in an affective state of anticipation of a cancer diagnosis? We conducted participant obser…
Not a film about my slackness
Persistent medically unexplained symptoms have debilitating consequences for adolescents, dramatically altering their social world and future aspirations. Few studies have focused on social and moral aspects of illness experience relevant to adolescents. In this study, the aim is to explore these aspects in depth by focusing on a single case and to address how young people attempt to create social accountability in a search for meaning when facin…
Illness Behavior and Functional Somatic Symptoms – Rethinking the Concept of Illness Behavior from an Anthropological Perspective
Illness Behavior and Functional Somatic Symptoms – Rethinking the Concept of Illness Behavior from an Anthropological Perspective
Illness explanations among patients with medically unexplained symptoms
Patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are often considered to be strictly confined to thinking about their symptoms as having only a physical etiology. However, several studies have shown, that the patients also apply other explanations for their sufferings. The aim of this study is to analyse the social construction of illness explanations among patients with MUS, and to illustrate the use of explanatory idioms as being dependent on…
Attitudes towards sickness absence and sickness presenteeism in health and care sectors in Norway and Denmark
The general interpretation of the findings was that attitudes towards sickness absence and sickness presenteeism among nursing home employees were embedded in situational patterns of moral relationships and were connected to a specific job identity. These patterns were constituted by the perception of colleagues, the social commitment to residents, and they influence on what was deemed as acceptable and non-acceptable reasons for sickness absence…
The importance of contextualization. Anthropological reflections on descriptive analysis, its limitations and implications
This paper regards a concern for the quality of analyses made on the basis of qualitative interviews in some parts of qualitative health research. Starting with discussions departing in discussions on studies exploring 'patient delay' in healthcare seeking, it is argued that an implicit and simplified notion of causality impedes reflexivity on social context, on the nature of verbal statements and on the situatedness of the interview encounter. F…
Sharing or not sharing? Balancing uncertainties after cancer in urban Norway
In this article we explore the uncertainties of living in the aftermath of cancer treatment within the context of the Norwegian welfare state. Serious illnesses confront people with the uncertainty of life itself. We suggest that managing this form of existential uncertainty is inherently a social process and their considerations of whether or not to share worries are part of the everyday management of social relationships. We refer to this proce…
What doyouthink?' the collaborative practices of choice and care in a Danish obstetric ultrasound unit
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork at an obstetric ultrasound unit in Denmark and explores the few, intense minutes of clinical interaction following a high-risk screening result for Down's syndrome. The category of high-risk transforms the routine ultrasound into a situation of inescapable choice, where the health of the foetus is questioned and decisions must be made. The clinical interactions following a high-risk result are investi…
Class, Social Suffering, and Health Consumerism
In recent years an extensive social gradient in cancer outcome has attracted much attention, with late diagnosis proposed as one important reason for this. Whereas earlier research has investigated health care seeking among cancer patients, these social differences may be better understood by looking at health care seeking practices among people who are not diagnosed with cancer. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among two different soc…
Ignoring Symptoms
This article explores the process of interpreting bodily sensations after completed cancer treatment. We base our analysis on repeated interviews over a period of 12 months with eight participants who had different cancer diagnoses. By using the concepts of 'sensation schemas' and 'sensation scripts', we explore how sensation schemas of cancer dominated in the first period, while schemas of late effects and reduced tolerance for daily life activi…
Approaching Health in Landscapes
Chronic cancer patients (CCPs) pay attention and act in response to diverse bodily sensations they experience in everyday life after a cancer episode. Here, we analyse how North Norwegian CCPs use their familiar surroundings in an effort to counter bad mood, anxiety and symptoms of relapse and to strengthen their health. The core participants of the anthropological fieldwork over the course of one year were 10 CCPs from a small coastal village in…
Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Anthropology in Action. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Andersen, R.S., Nichter, M. & Risor, M.B. (2017). Introduction. Sensations, Symptoms and Healthcare Seeking. Anthropology in Action. 24(1), 1-5 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2017.240101
"Resisting "Reason
Social differences in health and illness are well documented in Denmark. However, little is known about how health practices are manifested in the everyday lives of different social classes. We propose acts of resistance and formation of health subjectivities as helpful concepts to develop our understanding of how dominant health discourses are appropriated by different social classes and transformed into different practices promoting health and …
Cancer-before-cancer
Approaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines what cancer is and how cancer-related potentialities are enacted and embodied in the context of contemporary regimes of anticipation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban Danish middle-class community among people who were not immediately afflicted by cancer, we describe different and paradoxical cancer mythologies and show how they provide …
Careful expressions of social aspects
Persistent health complaints pose communicative dilemmas in care encounters, adversely affecting patient experiences and pathways. Little is known about the impact and role of professionals in encounters with young people with incipient, debilitating, and persistent symptoms. This study aims to explore communicative dilemmas and the role of language in care provided by local professionals in high school settings, municipal services, and general p…
The cancer may come back
Little is known about how people living in the aftermath of cancer treatment experience and manage worries about possible signs of cancer relapse, not as an individual enterprise but as socially embedded management. One-year ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a coastal village of under 3000 inhabitants in northern Norway. Ten villagers who had undergone cancer treatment from six months to five years earlier were the main informants. During f…
Fixing my life
Little is known about the perspectives of young people suffering from medically unexplained symptoms. This study aims to explore the experiences and strategies of young Norwegians related to incipient and persistent health complaints affecting everyday life functioning. The study draws on field notes, video material and interview transcripts from a multi-sited ethnographic study of healthcare services and select schools in a small Norwegian town …
Not a film about my slackness
Persistent medically unexplained symptoms have debilitating consequences for adolescents, dramatically altering their social world and future aspirations. Few studies have focused on social and moral aspects of illness experience relevant to adolescents. In this study, the aim is to explore these aspects in depth by focusing on a single case and to address how young people attempt to create social accountability in a search for meaning when facin…
Am I fine
Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. This essential vulnerability calls forth processes of meaning making, of grappling with uncertainty and morality. In this article we explore the uncertainty and ambiguity that exists in the space between bodily sensations and symptoms of illness. Bodily sensations have the potential to become symptoms of disease or to be absorbed into ordinariness, pr…
Caught up in Care
Patients with chronic fatigue receive advice to improve symptom management and well-being. This advice is based on ideas of self-management and is conveyed during clinical assessment as "activity regulation." Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a hospital clinic in Norway, we show how these patients attempt to demonstrate their competences and everyday concerns, and how the ideology of self-management frames the hope for recovery and crafts a subj…
How life events are perceived to link to bodily distress
Chronic pelvic pain (CPP) is highly prevalent among women and the condition is poorly understood. In addition to multiple symptoms from the pelvis, CPP patients frequently suffer bodily distress like musculoskeletal pain and negative emotional, behavioral, and sexual implications. This paper is based on a qualitative study including semi-structured interviews with eight women with CPP. Our project has been conducted within the framework of phenom…
Responsibilities of Risk
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Denmark introduced repeated lock-downs of society, including outreach services and visits from social workers for people living with mental illnesses. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in this article we explore how people with mental illness react to and manage their lives amid COVID-19 mitigations, focusing on how they experience and negotiate vulnerability at personal and community level. We argue, that the subj…
Senses of Touch
Managing persistent physical symptoms when being social and active is the norm
PPS shaped the participants' sense of how to act towards their bodies and social relationships in interaction with societal norms. The participants' subject formation and symptom experiences should thus be seen as a biosocial process
Luckily-I am not the worrying kind
In Denmark, due to the implementation of the Non-specific Symptoms and Signs of Cancer-Cancer Patient Pathway (NSSC-CPP), more people with symptoms such as fatigue and weight loss are informed that their symptoms might indicate cancer and they are referred to the pathway. But what do patients in the NSSC-CPP experience, in particular, with respect to being in an affective state of anticipation of a cancer diagnosis? We conducted participant obser…
Affective Processes and the Diagnosing of Chronic Fatigue
In this article, Risør and Nissen are dedicated to examining the assessment of chronic fatigue and clinical encounters in a clinic in Norway. We particularly attend to affects, which drive the setting of diagnosis and care. In our analysis, intensities, affective attunements, and atmospheres determine the course of the consultations and play a decisive role in enacting the relational encounters. We suggest that affectivity clarifies that being "u…
Expanding Medical Semiotics
This special issue explores the evolving landscape of medical semiotics of conventional biomedicine. With expansion we refer to the range of phenomena considered signs or symptoms of underlying disease, but also the growing anthropological attention to the medical sign system in ways which reach beyond classic semiotic analysis. The articles testify to the expansion in terms of empirical foci and theoretical contributions. As part of the introduc…
Psychology (23 obras) · Medicine (17 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Health care (11 obras) · Social Psychology (9 obras) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (8 obras) · Political science (8 obras) · Empathy and Medical Education (7 obras) · Psychiatry (7 obras)