Conference • NNHSH 2013 Theme: Transformations of Health Practices and Health Policies in the Nordic Welfare States

With the theme of the research conference of the NNHSH network we want researchers, both at doctoral and post-doctoral level, to reflect on how health practices and health policies in the Nordic Welfare States are being transformed and have been transformed in the past. The Nordic countries are all, more or less, in the midst of a transformation from a social democratic health care system, based on universal access for all citizens with no regard to their position, class or previous health practices, to a more neoliberal oriented health care regime with new - or perhaps in some ways very old - ideas about the body, health, and health care responsibilities. Sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt (1956) once suggested that the idea of "citizenship" in the development of a societal structure like the Western states of today served to establish a historically new position for individuals in preference to kinship and family status. Within different forms of government, such responsibilities are balanced differently between individual, family and state. For more than a century responsibility for health and healthiness in the Nordic countries has to a great extent been incumbent on the state. At the same time transformations of political ideologies have led to more pressure on individual - and familial - responsibilities. The conference aims at encouraging scholarly discussions highlighting the transformations of health politics in the Nordic countries and the consequences as observed and experienced by people in this context. Topics discussed can revolve around the role of governments in the furthering of transformations - be it regarding patient education, expectations of empowerment of the elderly in elderly care, or negotiations about the right to biological parenthood. It can also be about peoples´ embodied, verbalized and negotiated responses to the changes taking place. Furthermore, any health situation does not only concern patients or other people in need of care or help, but it also includes family-members as care providers, who may be drawn in to this role due to increasing expectations of kinship obligations and responsibilities