Papers by Sara Marie Offersen
UCL Press eBooks, Feb 13, 2023
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
British Journal of Occupational Therapy, Mar 10, 2021
Palliative Medicine, 2020
Background: The Cancer Home-Life Intervention showed no significant effects, and examination of t... more Background: The Cancer Home-Life Intervention showed no significant effects, and examination of the processes affecting or inhibiting outcomes is relevant. Aim: To evaluate the Cancer Home-Life Intervention for its processes of implementation, mechanisms of impact and contextual factors. Design: Process evaluation conducted alongside the randomised controlled trial, using quantitative and qualitative methods (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02356627). The Cancer Home-Life Intervention is a tailored, occupational therapy–based programme. Setting/participants: This study took place in participants’ homes and at hospital. A total of 113 home-dwelling adults (⩾18 years) with advanced cancer who had received the Cancer Home-Life Intervention were included, together with five intervention-therapists. Results: All 113 participants (100%) received a first home visit; 32 participants (26%) received a second visit; and 4 participants (3%) received a third visit. Median number of delivered intervention ...
British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 2021
Introduction For people living with advanced cancer, the possibilities for experiences of joy are... more Introduction For people living with advanced cancer, the possibilities for experiences of joy are seriously influenced by the consequences of the illness. Due to the limited expected lifetime, the need to support such experiences that may entail joy and contribute to quality of life are of importance. Research shows that people with advanced cancer experience quality of life through occupations they are able to perform and enjoy. The aim of this study was to describe which occupations contribute to joy for people living with advanced cancer and explore how they reflect upon these occupations during an occupational therapy intervention. Methods In total, 111 people with advanced cancer from the intervention group in a randomised controlled trial participated in the present study. Thirty-six of these participants were interviewed, and for 10 participants, this was combined with participant observations. A directed and a conventional content analysis were applied. Results 148 occupatio...
Tidsskrift for forskning i sygdom og samfund, Dec 23, 2022
BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth
Background Abdominal examination is a routine procedure performed by midwives several times durin... more Background Abdominal examination is a routine procedure performed by midwives several times during pregnancy to monitor the growth and well-being of the baby. Literature and instructions regarding abdominal examination focus on the technical performance, with limited attention paid to the women’s experience of the examination or the bonding-related aspects between the mother and baby. The aim of the study was to explore how pregnant women experience the abdominal examination and how the examination affects maternal–fetal attachment. Methods Participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 10 pregnant women. We used thematic analysis to identify themes across the empirical material. Results We identified the following four central themes: an essential examination, the baby becomes real, the importance of being involved and different senses provide different experiences. These themes describe how the women regarded the abdominal examination as an essential part of the midwi...
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for ... more Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death— and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encour...
Medicine Anthropology Theory | An open-access journal in the anthropology of health, illness, and medicine, 2016
Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. ... more 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, prompting the question: how do we ascribe meaning to sensations? In the context of middle-class everyday life in Denmark, we show how different potentialities of ambiguous sensations are weighed against each other on a culturally and morally contingent continuum between normal and not normal, uncovering the complex interplay between the body, everyday life, and pervasive biomedical discourses focusing on health promotion, symptom awareness, and care seeking.
Anthropology in Action
This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensation... more This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensations into symptoms are embedded in what we term a ‘moral sensescape’ of everyday life. Based on fieldwork in a suburban middle-class neighbourhood in Denmark, we discuss how a moral relation between the Danish welfare state and the middle-class population is embodied in a responsibility for individual health. Overall, we identify a striving to be a ‘good citizen’; this entails conflicting moral possibilities in relation to experiencing, interpreting and acting on bodily sensations. We examine how people meet the conflicting moral possibilities of complying with current public health rhetoric on proper healthcare seeking, including timely presentation of symptoms, and simultaneously try to avoid misusing the healthcare system and be characterised as overly worried or even as a hypochondriac; this challenge constitutes complex navigational routes through the moral sensescape of the Danish mid...
Medicine Anthropology Theory | An open-access journal in the anthropology of health, illness, and medicine
Approaching the presence of cancer in everyday life in terms of mythologies, the article examines... more 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 multiple ways of understanding, anticipating, and dealing with cancer in everyday life. Special attention is paid to the relation between biomedically informed notions of symptoms and bodily processes, and a ghostly and muted presence of cancer, particularly when people are faced with more tangible cancer worries. We explore how contemporary cancer disease-control strategies emphasising ‘symptom awareness’ interweave with and add to cancer mythologies. We suggest that these strategies also carry moral significance as directives (be aware of ...
This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensation... more This article explores how healthcare-seeking practices and the transformation of bodily sensations into symptoms are embedded in what we term a ‘moral sensescape’ of everyday life. Based on fi eldwork in a suburban middle-class neighbourhood in Denmark, we discuss how a moral relation between the Danish welfare state and the middle-class population is embodied in a responsibility for individual health. Overall, we identify a striving to be a ‘good citizen’; this entails confl icting moral possibilities in relation to experiencing, interpreting and acting on bodily sensations. We examine how people meet the conflicting moral possibilities of complying with current public health rhetoric on proper healthcare seeking, including timely presentation of symptoms, and simultaneously try to avoid misusing the healthcare system and be characterised as overly worried or even as a hypochondriac; this challenge constitutes complex navigational routes through the moral sensescape of the Danish middle class.
Woven into the fabric of human existence is the possibility of death and suffering from disease. ... more 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, prompting the question: how do we ascribe meaning to sensations? In the context of middle-class everyday life in Denmark, we show how different potentialities of ambiguous sensations are weighed against each other on a culturally and morally contingent continuum between normal and not normal, uncovering the complex interplay between the body, everyday life, and pervasive biomedical discourses focusing on health promotion, symptom awareness, and care seeking.
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Papers by Sara Marie Offersen