Paper Short Abstract:

How might one study preventive healthcare in a welfare state like Denmark's ethnographically? In this paper, I reflect on how the fine-grained and intimate strengths of ethnography can be reoriented to grasp social formations as these traverse sites, scales and temporalities.

Paper Abstract:

How might one study preventive healthcare in a welfare state like Denmark's ethnographically? In this paper, I reflect on how the fine-grained and intimate strengths of ‘being there’ ethnography can be reoriented in attempts to grasp social formations as these traverse sites, scales and temporalities. In recent decades, a preventive healthcare complex as taken form in Denmark aimed at averting the occurrence of disease through the (ever) expanding segmentation of the population into differentiated ‘at risk’ groups with attendant routinization of pre-emptive actions and/or augmented vigilance trajectories. By zooming in on one form of genetic prevention – lifelong medical surveillance of people living with Lynch syndrome – I show how site-multiplied assemblage ethnographies can help us locate the intimate experiences of those who have been identified ‘at risk’ within the broader socio-historical formations that inevitably shape such experiences in profound ways.