Stig Halvard Jørgensen 1953–2024

Stig Halvard Jørgensen (Photo: Olav Fjær, April 2018)

Stig Halvard Jørgensen died unexpectedly on 10 January 2024, aged 70. He was Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim (NTNU), from 1998 until his retirement in 2019. The day before his death he had met up with colleagues for lunch at the university canteen at Dragvoll and was full of plans for the coming months. Stig was a skiing enthusiast and planned to take part in the 70-km long Marcialonga ski race from Moena to Cavalese in the Italian Dolomites at the end of January and in the 90-km long Vasaloppet ski race from Sälen to Mora in Sweden at the beginning of March. It was not to be. He died of a heart attack while out skiing with friends and colleagues in the NTNU Wednesday skiing group – in his right element, but much too early.

Stig was born on 17 August 1953 in Denmark but moved with his Norwegian mother to Norway at the age of one. He had a passion for outdoor life from an early age. He began university studies in Bergen, where he met his future wife, Gunvor Larsen, from Alta. After studying geography at the University of Bergen and then sociology at the University of Trondheim, Stig began his master’s degree at the Department of Geography, University of Trondheim (now NTNU) in 1980. His supervisor was the department’s founder, Professor Asbjørn Aase. Stig’s master’s dissertation was a geographical analysis of the distribution of local authority welfare measures within Trondheim (Jørgensen 1982). After completing his master’s degree, he worked in the department as research assistant in the Urban Research Programme (Byforskningsprogrammet), funded by the Council for Research for Social Planning (Rådet for forskning for samfunnsplanlegging, RFSP). Stig cooperated with Britt Dale on a report on the social geography of Norway’s four largest cities, one of the final reports of the programme (Dale & Jørgensen 1986). Later, Stig took part in a follow-up analysis of the development of level of living within Trondheim in the 1990s (Brattbakk et al. 2000).

In 1984, Stig became research assistant at the Department of Geography on a project on medical geography in social planning led by Asbjørn Aase. Stig contributed an article on geographical aspects of health, comparing approaches within medical geography and welfare geography (Jørgensen 1986). He left the department in 1985 to work as a planner at the Regional Hospital in Trondheim (now St. Olavs Hospital). This led to employment at the Norwegian Institute of Hospital Research (Norsk institutt for sykehusforskning), which belonged to the Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research (Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning, SINTEF) in Trondheim. There, Stig’s work involved analysis of hospital statistics for topics such as health quality control, community health provision, hospital waiting lists, and evaluations of hospital efficiency. An example of a project he was involved in was a study of the occurrence and probability of returning to work after orthopaedic surgery (Rossvoll et al. 1993).

Stig returned to the Department of Geography as Associate Professor in 1998. He worked on topics related to health and welfare, following up Asbjørn Aase’s health geography perspective at the department. In a special issue of the journal Norsk Epidemiologi on ‘Geographical epidemiology’, for which Aase was guest editor (Aase 1998), Stig wrote a review (Jørgensen 1998) comparing two health atlases; these were a health atlas for Hordaland County (Hansen et al. 1996) and the National Atlas for Norway’s volume on health (Aase & Storm-Furu 1996). Stig was very much a team worker, engaging in collaborative and interdisciplinary research, and this was reflected in the great majority of his publications. He co-authored a chapter on the geographical distribution of public health services in a book om social causes of ill health (Sund & Jørgensen 2009). He was co-author of two studies using data from the Trøndelag Health Study (Helseundersøkelsen i Trøndelag, HUNT) (Sund et al. 2007; Nielsen et al. 2023). He was co-editor of a book on geography and health in the Nordic countries (Schærström et al. 2014a), in which he was one of the authors of an introduction to Nordic geographical approaches to health (Schærström et al. 2014b) and wrote a chapter arguing that more attention should be paid to road traffic injuries in the geography of health (Jørgensen 2014).

Stig’s particular interest was in transport and traffic from a health perspective. In 1999, Stig and geographer colleague Albert M. Abane at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana had a joint paper published comparing patterns of traffic accidents in Trondheim and Accra (Jørgensen & Abane 1999). Together with environmental scientist Andy Jones at the University of East Anglia in England, Stig wrote a paper in 2003 on predictive modelling of road accident outcomes (Jones & Jørgensen 2003). Stig was interviewed in the media on traffic risks, for example a broadcast in November 2012 on young people being the group with the highest risk of dying in traffic accidents. He had by then started a long and fruitful collaboration with social psychologists Torbjørn Rundmo, Trond Nordfjærn and other colleagues at the Department of Psychology, NTNU, who specialized in research on risk and safety in the transport sector. Between 2010 and 2019, Stig co-authored together with them a long succession of research articles within this field of research (Rundmo & Jørgensen 2010; 2016; Nordfjærn et al. 2010; 2011; 2012a; 2012b; 2014; 2015; 2019; Rundmo et al. 2011; Lind et al. 2015). The research group appreciated particularly Stig’s geographical perspective and his talents as both organizer and researcher and benefitted from his international research network.

Alongside health geography, Stig’s research interests included development geography more generally. He took over from Asbjørn Aase as leader of a project that promoted research and teaching cooperation with the University of Accra and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, with Norwegian funding from the Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education (NUFU). Some of the research results of this cooperation were published in a special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography on ‘New Faces of Poverty in Ghana’, for which Stig was co-author along with geography colleagues Ragnhild Lund at NTNU and Samuel Agyei-Mensah at the University of Ghana (Lund et al. 2008). Stig’s contribution to the special issue was a review of poverty discourses with special reference to Ghana (Jørgensen 2008). Cooperation with Ghana included field courses in Ghana for the Norwegian students and master’s degree studies in Trondheim for the African students, the latter especially concerned with health and poverty in various African countries, including a focus on traffic risks and accidents.

Stig had work published and he taught in all his fields of interest – health geography, urban geography and development studies – and was responsible for teaching quantitative methods in the Department of Geography. He also taught in health science and epidemiology at other NTNU departments. He enjoyed teaching and was an engaged and popular supervisor of students at bachelor, master’s and doctoral levels. One of Stig’s last master’s students thanked him in 2019 for good conversations, answers to all questions, academic competence, constructive feedback, supportive words, and not least for being available when needed.

For eight years from 2007, Stig organized together with colleague Haakon Lein an annual geography field course in Pasvik in Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. This followed from an earlier master’s field course in Finnmark and Kola, which Asbjørn Aase had organized in 1994. One of the students who had participated in the 1994 field course later took up employment at Pasvik Folk High School in Finnmark. He contacted the Department of Geography in 2007 and suggested collaborating to organize further such field courses. These proved to be popular and helped to attract students to the department. Stig was the ideal leader of the courses; he was sociable, had a good sense of humour, and knew how to deal with students, giving them a great degree of freedom while maintaining their respect. One master’s student, when thanking him after the field course in Pasvik and Kola in autumn 2009, said that Stig had made a greater impression on the students’ lives than he was probably aware of himself.

Physical activity, especially skiing, was an important part of Stig’s lifestyle. In the summer, he often used roller skis, even to and from work. He could also use roller skis to and from social gatherings and even take them to conferences and travels abroad. He aroused intrigued attention on one occasion when he used rollers skis to train on an abandoned airfield in Ghana.

Stig travelled extensively within Norway and abroad, both on work-related journeys and journeys together with his wife Gunvor and/or their son Erik. Stig and Gunvor’s last journey abroad was a three-week interrail trip from Norway through Europe to Turkey in October 2023. Stig was a member of the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (Norges Naturvernforbund) and valued nature and outdoor recreation. He walked long distances in the mountains and had overnight stays in the majority of tourist lodges and cabins in Norway and Sweden.

During the last two years of his life, Stig met up regularly for lunch at Dragvoll on Tuesdays with colleagues and friends. During the lunch meetings, Stig was convivial and had much of interest to tell about his varied experiences through life. He told about his travels and ski trips. The meetings served as a vent for talking about both positive and frustrating experiences. Stig was playful, both physically and verbally, and had his own subtle way of expressing himself. During his last four months, Stig and Gunvor experienced the joy of becoming grandparents when their granddaughter was born.

As a health geographer, Stig had an interest in life expectancy. He had found out that statistically it was possible to have ten good years after becoming a pensioner. Stig retired in 2019; he had five good years before he died but during that time he had experienced more than the average pensioner would experience, regardless of how long they lived.