Aarhus University

Despite regularly ranking high up in global happiness indexes, the image of the Nordic people as extraordinarily suicidal has persisted since the 1960s. The fact is that most studies do not indicate a particularly strong tendency towards suicide in the Nordic region. Nordic people are just like people elsewhere. Their struggles with suicide indicate the challenges of modern society and the tragedy of mental illness.

There is a common understanding outside the Nordic countries that Nordic people can all understand one another’s languages, or at least the Scandinavians (the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians) can. However, this impression of linguistic unity is not wholly accurate.

Watch a 10-minute film on why modern business people like to compare themselves to their vision of the Vikings.

Listen to a podcast on hot topics in current academic research on the Nordic region today include welfare, colonialism and heterogeneity.

Listen to a podcast on how we make sense of all the historical images that are fired at us all the time, and whether we ever stop to ask who is creating them and for what purpose.

Danish nurses still receive 10-20% less in pay than male-dominated professions requiring a similar level of education. There are many contributing factors to unequal pay, but a recent report from the Danish Institute for Human Rights found that one key reason is the effect of the 1969 Public Servant Reform Act which saw nurses and other female-dominated professions placed at a lower pay level. In recent national negotiations, Danish nurses voted ‘no’ to a pay offer of up to 5% which was set to preserve real wages for public workers over the next three years. A citizens' petition to reform the law in respect of many traditionally female professions has also received the requisite 50,000 signatures for it to make it to parliament.

Listen to a podcast which takes contemporary, cultural case studies and traces them back in history to uncover important narratives that often go overlooked.

Overshadowed by British and French Imperialism, the small-scale colonialism of some of the Nordic countries can all too easily be downplayed. From the 19th century, the self-image of the Nordic countries as a group of small, neutral nations has probably perpetuated this misconception. However, Denmark-Norway engaged in a variety of colonial activities throughout the world from the 17th century which still have legacies today. On a lesser scale compared to other colonial powers, its colonalism was characterised by different contexts - some of them brutal - in the Caribbean, West Africa, India and Greenland.

Racial prejudice in many Nordic children’s classics can be overt or more subtly embedded. The republishing of some of these controversial books in e.g. Sweden and Iceland discloses contemporary views of race and reveals how the past is positioned in contemporary Nordic society.