Rural Denmark Research Articles

Risk factors of epistaxis in rural Denmark: a cross-sectional population-based survey of data from the Lolland-Falster health study.

Epistaxis is a common condition that affects about 60% of the population in their lifetime, with 6% needing medical attention. Little is known about the epidemiology and risk factors of epistaxis outside the health care system. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and risk factors of epistaxis in a rural Danish population using data from the Lolland-Falster Health Study (LOFUS). We conducted a cross-sectional survey based on data from LOFUS, a household-based, prospective cohort study in the rural provincial area of Lolland-Falster, Denmark. We enrolled 10,065 participants (≥ 50 years) and collected data on demographics, comorbidities, medication, lifestyle factors, and laboratory parameters. Logistic regressions were used to test for correlations between epistaxis and different risk factors. In total 5.3% of the participants had experienced epistaxis within the past 30 days, and 7.9% had sought medical attention for epistaxis at some point in their lives. We identified several factors that were significantly correlated with increased odds of epistaxis, such as male gender, age group 50-59 years, high BMI (> 25), allergy, diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, angina, and anticoagulant treatment. Excellent or good self-reported health was correlated to significantly lower odds of epistaxis. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the prevalence and risk factors of epistaxis outside the health care system. Our study suggests that preventive measures targeting these risk factors may reduce the incidence and severity of epistaxis in this population.

Young refugees’ feelings of belonging? Encounters with rural Denmark and northern Norway

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how young refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience their new places of residence. We find inspiration in the idea of ‘contradictions of space’ (Kinkaid [2020]. “Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Social Space.” Society and Space 38 (1): 167–186.) in exploring how young refugees navigate issues in rural life from housing, education, work and social life to their material surroundings, including the weather. Which experiences result in feelings of meaning and orientation, and which spur feelings of disorientation and contradiction? The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with young refugees and local volunteers in rural Norway and Denmark. Despite several differences between rural areas in the two countries, young refugees’ experiences from within show many similarities and common experiences between them. The harsh weather, empty streets, lack of familiarity with the more formal community life in rural areas, long distances from sites of education, etc. create feelings of disorientation and contradiction, while socializing with other refugees provides feelings of community and belonging. Taken together, the two aspects drive their decisions to stay in or leave the rural area.

A state within reach? An ethnographic case study on the relocation of a government workplace from Copenhagen to a small town in rural Denmark

Exploring the redistribution of state jobs from Copenhagen to provincial Denmark, this article draws upon an ethnographic case study involving the relocation of a government workplace, Nota, to the small town of Nakskov (12,500 inhabitants) on the rural island of Lolland. Taking up residence in the town's central square, the article examines the everyday social and economic expectations and norms Nota encounters in this new locale. Based on social scientific theories of practice communities and local economic circles, the analysis illustrates how the state institution must navigate two parallel and opposing economic circuits: that of the state, marked by inflexibility and uniformity, and that of the local town community, grounded in pragmatism and adaptability. The state's standardising central-economic line of procedure is shown to hinder the relocated workplace in becoming part of and contributing to the new host town's own local-economic systems of exchange. In conclusion, the article argues that in daily life a fundamental conflict of interests between state-economic rules and local-economic norms emerges on the ground, meaning that, despite being introduced as decentralisation, when seen from the perspective of the site of relocation, the redistribution of state jobs in Denmark remains bound by logic of centralisation.

Diagnostic accuracy of BASIC-Q for detection of cognitive impairment in a primary care setting – a cross-validation study

ObjectivesThis study aims to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy and reliability of a new, brief questionnaire, ‘Brief Assessment of Impaired Cognition– Questionnaire’ (BASIC-Q) for detection of cognitive impairment, primarily developed for use in primary care. BASIC-Q has three components: Self-report, Informant report, and Orientation. Self-report and Orientation are completed by the individual and Informant report is answered by a close relative.MethodsWe included 275 participants ≥ 70 years, without a prior diagnosis of dementia, and with a close relative who agreed to participate as an informant. Participants were included prospectively in 14 general practices in urban and rural Denmark using a convenience sampling method. The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS), the informant-completed Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ) and reported memory concern were used as a reference standard for the classification of the participants’ cognitive function.ResultsBASIC-Q demonstrated a fair to good diagnostic accuracy to differentiate between people with cognitive impairment and normal cognition with an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.84 (95% CI 0.79–0.89) and a sensitivity and specificity of 0.80 (95% CI 0.72–0.87) and 0.71 (95% CI 0.63–0.78). A prorated BASIC-Q score derived from BASIC-Q without Informant report had significantly lower classification accuracy than the full BASIC-Q. The test-retest reliability of BASIC-Q was good with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.84.ConclusionBASIC-Q is a brief, easy-to-use questionnaire for identification of cognitive impairment in older adults. It demonstrated fair to good classification accuracy in a general practice setting and can be a useful case-finding tool when suspecting dementia in primary health care.

It’s not (only) about Getting the Last Word: Rhetorical Norms of Public Argumentation and the Responsibility to Keep the Conversation Going

The core function of argumentation in a democratic setting must be to constitute a modality for citizens to engage differences of opinion constructively – for the present but also in future exchanges. To enable this function requires acceptance of the basic conditions of public debate: that consensus is often an illusory goal which should be replaced by better mastery of living with dissent and compromise. Furthermore, it calls for an understanding of the complexity of real-life public debate which is an intermixture of claims of fact, definition, value, and policy, each of which calls for an awareness of the greater ‘debate environment’ of which particular deliberative exchanges are part. We introduce a rhetorical meta-norm as an evaluation criterion for public debate. In continuation of previous scholarship concerned with how to create room for differences of opinion and how to foster a sustainable debate culture, we work from a civically oriented conception of rhetoric. This conception is less instrumental and more concerned with the role of communication in public life and the maintenance of the democratic state. A rhetorical meta-norm of public argumentation is useful when evaluating public argumentation – not as the only norm, but integrated with specific norms from rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and formal logic. We contextualise our claims through an example of authentic contemporary public argumentation: a debate over a biogas generator in rural Denmark.

Rural Development Potential in the Bioeconomy in Developed Countries: The Case of Biogas Production in Denmark

Policy makers have expressed much optimism about the potentials of the bioeconomy in terms of economic growth and job creation in rural areas in developed countries. However, only few studies have attempted to quantify the rural employment effects of bioeconomic projects. This paper uses the biogas production in Denmark as a case within the bioeconomy. It performs a regional input-output analysis to estimate the number of jobs created in rural areas by an increase in the biogas production. The input-output analysis estimates the direct job creation at the biogas plants, the indirect job creation at firms that supply inputs to the plants, and the induced job creation that is generated locally through increased income spending. The results show that an increase in the biogas production by 10% of the available farm manure will give a permanent increase of 342 jobs and an extra annual income of approximately 21 million euros. Consequently, if all available biomass from farm manure were to be used in biogas production, it would result in 3420 jobs. The calculated employment effect is quite sizable but still somewhat modest compared to the significant employment declines in rural Denmark in recent years. Meanwhile, biogas is only one element in the bioeconomy.

Micropolitical practices of multispatial metagovernance in rural Denmark

Research on governance, network governance and metagovernance has shown how the practice of governing involves a diversity of actors in and beyond the state. Much attention has been paid to the role of powerful state and non-state actors while less consideration has been directed at less visible and marginalised actors who are recognised as participants but whose agency is rarely subjected to in-depth research. In this article, we address this lack by studying the micropolitical practices of place-based self-governing networks in the Danish countryside and their role in governing rural places. Our theoretical point of departure is Bob Jessop’s notion of multispatial metagovernance which we seek to enhance by considering marginalised actors around the edges of the state apparatus. Our findings suggest that these marginalised and overlooked actors are not just subjected to governance but actively partake in shaping the governance landscape by enveloping rural places for self-governance in four distinct ways: (1) subverting municipal micro-technologies of power; (2) filling the void created by scalar fixes; (3) keeping local organising efforts fluid and opaque to outsiders and (4) orchestrating strategically selective cooperation with extra-local actors. Without downplaying asymmetries of power and their influence on governance outcomes, we conclude that metagovernance and collibration are not just prerogatives of the powerful. Generating adequate understandings of such practices is therefore only possible if we consider the full breadth of involved actors without taking for granted that outcomes are always decided in advance by the powerful. The study that the article reports on shows one of the ways in which this task may be approached empirically.

To the manor born: a new microlevel wage database for eighteenth-century Denmark

Abstract We document and make available to the scholarly community a uniquely detailed database of 20,680 observations of wages for men, women, and children and 30,000 observations of prices from eighteenth-century rural Denmark. These microlevel data were originally collected by the Danish Price History Project but have not previously been released. To illustrate the usefulness of such data, we discuss possible applications.

Refugees' Encounters With Nordic Rural Areas-Darkness, Wind and "Hygge"!

The paper investigates how refugees settled in rural Norway and Denmark experience and interact with their new rural places of residence. Theoretically, the paper finds inspiration in “phenomenology of practices” (Simonsen, Prog. Hum. Geogr., 2012, 37, 10–26), which emphasizes the bodily and sensory experiences of daily life that spur feelings of, for example, “orientation” or “disorientation”. The empirical material is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews with refugees and local volunteers in 2016/2017/2019 in small towns in the rural north of Norway and rural Denmark. There are several differences between the Norwegian and Danish rural areas, in relation to distances, climate and population density. Nonetheless, the ways in which the rural areas are experienced from within, by refugees settled there, show surprisingly many similarities. Many of the informants, in both the Norwegian and Danish cases, initially expressed frustration at being placed in rural areas without having any say in the matter. Those who were former city-dwellers especially experienced moments of disorientation, as their encounters with Nordic rural life were experienced as the opposite of their urban backgrounds. Limiting structural conditions very much shape the everyday lives of refugees in the first years, when they do not have a car or the financial capacity to find their own house. They feel stressed, with busy everyday lives made up of long commuting hours on public transport. In these first years of uncertainty, the dark and harsh weather very much adds to the feeling of stress and insecurity. What seem to add “orientation” are social relations with other refugees and local volunteers organizing activities.

Vital Masculinity: Assemblages of Debility and Capacity in the Danish Lifestyle TV Show Real Men

ABSTRACT The Danish TV show Real Men aims to inform viewers about popular health science, illness and health-related subjects whilst entertaining them with insights into the lives of people in pursuit of “health and happiness”—in this case, a handful of middle-aged men from rural Denmark. In this article, we investigate Real Men as an example of the ways in which the middle-aged male-sexed body is increasingly becoming medicalized. Drawing on assemblage theory, and feminist theories of class, ability, and fat, this article explores how notions of the middle-aged male-sexed body occur, assemble and emerge within a mediated framework of health and masculinity with a focus on affect and materiality. We introduce the term vital masculinity and suggest it as an analytical tool in order to understand how new/old notions of masculinity emerge through representations of bodily capacity and debility in a popular mainstream TV show.

Technosocial configurations for sociability in rural Denmark

Abstract The proliferation of ICTs, including social media platforms, has the potential to substantially affect the technological mix that underpins rural sociability. Little is currently known about the practices of technology use emerging from this novel situation. The paper takes steps to address this gap by applying a Foucauldian-inspired mundane technologies perspective to investigate the technosocial configurations for rural sociability after the introduction of social media platforms. Empirically, a mixed-methods approach including a quantitative phone survey and qualitative online ethnography, focusing on community groups on facebook, is used to study three small areas in the Danish countryside. Results show how rural residents employ a mix of embedded and disembedded technologies to inform themselves about social life in their area. Embedded technologies include noticeboards at grocery stores, village halls, and other meeting places; free weekly newspapers, brochures and leaflets delivered by mail; face-to-face interaction (in public spaces, at the workplace, and at home). Disembedded technologies include community websites, mailing lists and newsletters, text messaging chains, and social media platforms. Importantly, technologies are used in complementary combination and a large majority of residents use several technologies. Social media platforms play a major role, but results do not suggest that they have replaced previous practices. Rather, the paper finds that they should be viewed as additions whose integration in the technology mix contributes to an on-going process of incremental reconfiguration. Rural sociability, then, has not been fundamentally reworked by the arrival of social media, although it has brought some changes of note, including the attenuation of local digital divides, the emergence of a new arena for social control, and an unprecedented external visibility of social life in the countryside, where outsiders may gain fragmented glimpses of the local gossip and goings-on.

Situating time

A scholarship on “time” has emerged that pays attention to the ways contemporary economic life and information technology affect temporal perception and practice. A critique of this scholarship, along with a joint reading and reinterpretation of Alfred Gell’s two books The anthropology of time and Art and agency, provides this article’s point of departure for “situating time” in the theoretical sense of setting out an explicit temporal ontology—a kind of reflection that I argue is often missing in scholarship on time. This temporal ontology is in turn substantiated and developed through an ethnographic exploration of time’s performative dimensions, brought to bear through practices of situating time, here in an ethnographic sense. The empirical material is from fieldwork among people working via the internet from their homes in rural Denmark.

‘Congenial drinking’ and accomplishments of place-belongingness among young people in rural Denmark

ABSTRACTWhile research on youthful drinking is extensive, the literature has been geographically skewed towards urban settings. As a potential corrective to this, our focus in this paper is on youthful drinking in rural Denmark. Based on 22 in-depth interviews with young drinkers, this paper explores the drinking practices of rural youth. More specifically, drawing on Antonsich’s [2010. “Searching for belonging–an analytical framework.” Geography Compass 4 (6): 644–659] notion of place-belongingness, we examine how sentiments of belonging relate to locally embedded drinking practices. We highlight the extent to which rural drinking places are characterized by the participation of young men, whose educational and professional aims are predominantly tied to the local community and activities within it. In so doing, we show that these contexts are primarily associated with ‘drinking a single’, as opposed to drinking to intoxication like their urban peers. We argue further that these ‘lighter’ but frequent forms of alcohol use, which we term ‘congenial drinking’, are related to accomplishments of place-belongingness and stand out as a gendered, classed and place-bound phenomenon.

The translocal fluidity of rural grassroots festivals in the network society

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of rural grassroots festivals in place-making processes associated with the network society. It mobilises dialectical notions of fixity and fluidity, continuity and change to produce a translocal perspective that builds on previous conceptual work by Manuel Castells – emphasising the space of flows and the space of places – and Greg Richards – focusing on iterative and pulsar events. From this vantage point the paper analyses how rural festivals are produced through networked performativity in the space of flows, while their cultural and social meanings are deeply embedded and localised in the space of places. Empirically, the current study builds upon six in-depth case studies of grassroots festivals in rural Denmark. The results suggest that peripherally located festivals were more oriented towards the space of flows than their centrally located counterparts. As a whole, findings indicate that the conceptual framework has potential as a valuable device in building a better understanding of the contemporary roles and functions of festivals in society. Simultaneously, the paper raises critical questions for future research about data collection and research ethics.

Days Worked and Seasonality Patterns of Work in Eighteenth Century Denmark

The calculation of the number of days worked per year is crucial for understanding pre‐industrial living standards, and yet has presented considerable obstacles due to data scarcity. We present evidence on days worked and seasonality patterns of work using evidence from a large database of micro‐level labor market data for eighteenth century rural Denmark. We estimate that workers worked approximately 5.6 days per week when under full employment. Seasonality of work meant, however, that they were unlikely to find employment during the winter, bringing the estimated number of working days per year to 184. This is lower than often assumed in the literature on real wage calculations, but in line with recent evidence for Malmo and London. We find that days worked increased over the eighteenth century, consistent with the idea of an “industrious revolution”. We suggest however that this was probably mostly due to economic necessity rather than a consumer revolution, since unskilled and low skilled workers needed to work over 300 days per year to afford a subsistence basket.

Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatisation in Rural Denmark

AbstractWhile issues of siting wind farms have often revolved around their local resistance, finding adequate locations and gaining access to land for large wind energy projects has become an increasingly significant challenge for developers, in particular in small countries with relatively mature wind energy sectors, such as Denmark. By drawing on the case of “Outskirts‐Denmark”, this paper focuses on how existing territorial stigma of rural areas is co‐produced and mobilised by wind farm developers to make space for large wind farm projects. In doing so, we demonstrate that the mobilisation of stigma through derogatory rhetoric and forecasting rural decline is used to legitimise the purchase and demolition of properties in marginalised rural areas. We then critically discuss how these developer practices produce controversies over the erosion of rural communities and are entangled in a neoliberal undermining of the planning system, revealing issues of rural energy justice.

The Robin: A Monologue of Aging With Chronic Diseases

In this article, I argue that ethnodramatic monologue is a valuable method for producing knowledge complementary to current research on living with chronic diseases. Inspired by discussions on ethnographic representations, I present the monologue of an older woman with chronic diseases. The monologue has been performed for a live audience, and several future performances are also booked; however, this article is an experiment on the textual presentation of a theatrical monologue. The protagonist’s voice is based on three interlocutors from my doctoral anthropological fieldwork, which was conducted among older people with chronic diseases in rural Denmark. Drawing on earlier training as a method actor, I consolidated notes, interviews, and observations to create a piece of art displaying my research. This article thus blends social sciences and the arts, building on the tradition of ethnographic theater.

New neighbours in a time of change: local pragmatics and the perception of asylum centres in rural Denmark

ABSTRACTAsylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres’ arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the opposed poles of xenophobia and humanitarianism. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines the meanings and consequences of asylum centres for rural Danish communities. Drawing on anthropological theory on the mutuality of social life we argue that asylum centres become embedded in pre-existing relations within local communities and between them and the centralising Danish welfare state. Local communities sometimes were initially sceptical about asylum centres, but they generally developed a collective, pragmatic approach towards them in contrast to the divided, ideological cast of national debates on asylum. By shifting focus from the national to the local, from the urban to the rural, and from the migrants to the neighbouring communities, a less polarising and more everyday mode of relating to the arrival of asylum seekers becomes visible.

Editors' introduction: Chaucer's global orbits and global communities

AbstractEncompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the “Inner Circle” of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo‐French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so‐called “nonacademics” have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and “amateur” cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating “a vibrant resonance,” as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between “amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism.” As the fields of comparative literary analysis, translation theory, and medievalism studies increasingly move away from models of textual “fidelity” that reinforce static distinctions between an “original” and a “derivative,” we offer this cluster of essays as an example of the benefits gained by pluralizing the modes through which we understand processes of linguistic transfer and cultural adaptation.

The effect of leprotic infection on the risk of death in medieval rural Denmark.

Paleopathological studies of leprosy in Danish skeletal collections show that many individuals suffered from this stigmatized disease during the Middle Ages. This study examines the risk of death associated with leprotic infection in individuals from the Danish rural cemetery of Øm Kloster (AD 1172-1536). Specifically, we modeled the influence of leprotic infection on age-specific mortality accounting also for sex and social status (lay person / monastic). The sample consisted of 311 adult individuals from the Øm Kloster skeletal collection housed at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Southern Denmark (ADBOU). We modeled morbidity and mortality using a three-state illness-death model with the following parameterizations for the three transition hazards: (1) nonlesioned to lesioned: constant; (2) nonlesioned to dead: Gompertz-Makeham; and (3) lesioned to dead: Gompertz-Makeham, directly proportional to the hazard of the well to dead transition. The mortality hazard of lesioned individuals exceeded that of nonlesioned individuals by a factor of 1.4 (40%) across all individuals, 1.7 for females, 1.0 for males, 1.3 for lay persons, and 1.7 for monastics. Overall, 15% of the sample died with skeletal manifestations of leprosy, though it is likely that a higher percentage of the population carried the bacterium. This study improves understanding of past health and population dynamics focusing on a chronic infectious disease. The methods employed could informatively be applied to larger analyses of community health from skeletal collections by incorporating more than one disease into the multistate model and inferring individual frailty using various skeletal markers.