A new PhD project from the Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University sheds light on the experiences of citizens and testing staff with the Danish testing system during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was carried out by anthropologist Charlotte Nørholm, who is defending her dissertation on November 3, 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everyday life for people across the globe. Governments introduced several strategies to contain and limit the spread of infection. In Denmark, testing became a central tool to protect the healthcare system and keep society open. But what was it like to live with and work within the Danish testing system? Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Charlotte Nørholm’s PhD project explores the experiences of citizens undergoing COVID-19 testing and the work of testing staff in carrying out, organizing, and maintaining the testing system. The project offers new insight into how a large-scale public health intervention became part of everyday life in a welfare state, and how people navigated a time marked by uncertainty and change. At the same time, the PhD project raises questions about how society balances the needs of individuals with those of the population as a whole, and how we manage tensions between care and control and between individual rights and collective safety during a global health crisis.

The defence is public and takes place on November 3, 2025 at 14.00 in Merete Barker Auditoritum, Lakeside Lecture Theatres, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 3, 8000 Aarhus. The title of the project is “Navigating Chronic Uncertainty: A socio-material ethnography of pandemic testing in the welfare society”. For more information, please contact PhD fellow Charlotte Nørholm, email: charlotte.norholm@clin.au.dk.

Assessment Committee

• Docent Aaro Tupasela, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki.
• Professor Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.
• Associate Professor Regine Grytnes, Centre for Patient-Reported Outcomes, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University (Chair).

Supervisors

• Professor Mette Terp Høybye, Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University.
• Professor Jens Seeberg, Department of Anthropology, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University.
• Professor Andreas Roepstorff, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University.
• Professor Lars Jørgen Østergaard, Department of Infectious Diseases, Aarhus University Hospital.