Someone like me; I go after staff with good vibes: An ethnographic study of ethnically minoritized patients in Danish healthcare through an equity lens

This thesis ‘Someone like me; I go after staff with good vibes: An ethnographic study of ethnically minoritized patients in Danish healthcare through an equity lens’, exa¬mines what the social categorization of ‘ethnic minority patients’ does in healthcare. The background of the study is the persistence of health inequities for ethnically minoritized patients, which has led to an international call for advancing racial and ethnic equity in health (The Lancet, 2022).

Based on an ethnographic study including policy documents and fieldwork among 13 patients in two orthopedic departments in Greater Copenhagen, Denmark, the interest is to examine healthcare in the intersections between the welfare state, institutions, and encounters.

By theoretically drawing on post-colonialism, post-structuralism and critical feminist theory, concepts of ethnicized and ethnically minoritized are applied and the thesis actively engages with concepts such as hegemony, othering, Eurocentrism, whiteness and (structural) discrimination in a modern and universal healthcare system.

The findings are presented in four articles which explore the social categorization of ‘ethnic minority patients’ through welfare representations, healthcare practices, patient workings and majorized positionings. (In)visibility and silence(d) become key to understand the persistence of health inequities for ethnicized patients in Danish healthcare. By developing the concept of (over)workings, the thesis proposes a concept that captures, elucidates, and grasps productions of health inequities for patients positioned in the margins of healthcare. This thesis then contributes to making productions of ethnicity visible and unsilenced and thereby aim to advance equity-oriented and anti-discriminatory work in healthcare both in theory and practice.