Missing the Feeling: Embodied Knowledge and Eating Disorders

 

 

Eating disorders are increasingly understood as conditions that fundamentally alter how individuals experience and inhabit their bodies. In this talk, I will examine how such perspectives challenge top-down conceptual models and argue for the development of a language capable of articulating the sensory and embodied dimensions of these experiences. I will explore the subject through different lenses – including lived experience, as the author of an illness narrative about eating disorders and recovery, and as an academic at the intersection of health sciences and medical humanities research. In doing so, I will consider how these different forms of knowledge can be brought into productive dialogue to deepen our understanding of eating disorders.

 

Biography: Dr Grace Lucas is an Associate Professor and Assistant Vice-President (Education) at City St George’s University of London. As an interdisciplinary academic, with a background in Medical Humanities, her work focuses on exploring the connections between embodiment and mental health and wellbeing. She is also the author of the bestselling memoir Thin (Penguin, 2007).