After Anorexia: Anthropological Perspectives on Recovery from Eating Disorders in Denmark
The project explores the ambiguities of recovery from anorexia, focusing on “quasi-recovery” and its temporal, social, affective, and existential dimensions. It aims to broaden understandings of recovery and inform future care and treatment.
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After Anorexia explores what it means to live in the in-between of illness and recovery. The “after” in the title points to the gap between the clinical after and the lived after, when individuals may be deemed clinically recovered but experience themselves as caught in, or not fully beyond, the illness. Focusing on “quasi-recovery,” a lay term used by people with eating disorders to describe such experiences, the project takes seriously the often hidden, debilitating, and enduring pain of physical, psychological, social, and existential distress. At the same time, it asks what recovery may generate personally and socially and seeks to understand how a lived “after” of anorexia may become possible to offer new perspectives on eating disorders, recovery, and treatment. |
Through ethnographic research, After Anorexia follows young people aged 18–34 in Denmark, exploring how experiences of anorexia are shaped by personal experiences, relationships, social environments, and systems of care. The project combines long-term fieldwork with people currently living in quasi-recovery and interviews with people who have moved through quasi-recovery towards full recovery. Participants will share experiences through interviews, diaries, photographs, and everyday encounters, with family members, friends, romantic partners, and healthcare professionals included where relevant.
A central theoretical ambition is to develop the concept of social generativity. Rather than understanding illness only through what it damages or restricts, the project explores how experiences of anorexia and recovery may generate new forms of meaning, belonging, relationships, direction, and ways of engaging with the world. This does not diminish the seriousness or pain of eating disorders, but draws attention to dimensions of illness and recovery that are often overlooked. The project also explores how anorexia and recovery may generate new perspectives on society, culture, and practices of treatment and care. Ultimately, it asks what may make an experienced “after” possible, and what recovery can mean beyond clinical definitions.
An international, interdisciplinary advisory board supports the project, including Rebecca Lester, Jason Throop, Douglas Holland, Lone Grøn, and René Støvring, bringing together expertise in medical and psychological anthropology, phenomenology, eating disorders, clinical treatment, and Danish health and care contexts. In its final phase, research participants and stakeholders, including patient organizations, healthcare professionals, health authorities, and educational institutions, will participate in co-creation workshops to explore how the project can contribute to future understandings of eating disorder recovery.
Researchers
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Funding
Project period: October 2026 - February 2031.