Associated with UCSF since 2021 | mikala.erlik@regionh.dk / erlik.mikala@gmail.com
Mikala Erlik is an anthropologist and holds a PhD completed at UCSF, with academic affiliation to Medicine, Culture and Society at the University of Copenhagen. Her research revolves around health inequality and everyday life, with particular attention to the people and lives that fall outside the healthcare system's imaginaries of the right way to live with illness.
Project
In her PhD dissertation, Lung Cancer, Rehabilitation, and Inequality in Everyday Life, Mikala examined everyday life among people with lung cancer who did not participate in cancer rehabilitation. Lung cancer is a diagnosis surrounded by powerful cultural and social imaginaries concerning blame, lifestyle, and appropriate ways of living with illness. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Mikala followed people with lung cancer in their everyday lives and examined what non-participation can reveal about the relationship between illness, everyday life, healthcare interventions, and inequality.
The project showed how rehabilitation and support enter lives already in motion, and how health inequality concerns more than access to healthcare. It also takes shape through which experiences, needs, and ways of living healthcare institutions are able to recognise and accommodate.
The project was funded by UCSF and partly by the Danish Cancer Society, and was carried out in collaboration with EXHALE and Copenhagen Centre for Cancer and Health.
Background
Before her academic career, Mikala Erlik worked as a social pedagogue, an experience that has left its mark on her approach to research. It gave her a familiarity with how welfare institutions meet people, and with what sometimes emerges in the gap between institutional expectations and the lives people actually live. A master's degree in educational anthropology carried her analytical gaze further, and the two layers, the practice-based and the theoretical, weave together in the way she works.
Mikala's primary method is ethnographic, meeting, participating, and experiencing alongside the people she studies. She has a particular interest in phenomenological approaches to experience, embodiment, and everyday life. Alongside fieldwork and writing, Mikala works with visual art. Paintings and field sketches form part of her research practice and are used both analytically and communicatively to explore aspects of experience that are not always easily captured in words.
Publications
- Erlik M. Lung cancer, rehabilitation, and inequality in everyday life [thesis]. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen; 2026.
- Erlik M, Hindhede AL, Missel M, Quist M, Timm H. Moments of misalignment: In the space and rhythms of cancer rehabilitation. Health (London) 2026 May 20:13634593261449202. doi: 10.1177/13634593261449202. Epub ahead of print. PMID:
42159158
- Erlik M, Hindhede A, Timm H. Exploring storylines on patient involvement in the Nordic welfare system: insights from Danish academic literature. Nordic Welfare Research 2026;11(2):1-13. doi:
10.18261/nwr.11.2.1.
- Erlik M, Missel M, Quist M, Timm H. Coming-around: living with lung cancer on the nether side of rehabilitation in Denmark. Med Anthropol 2025;44(6):576-589. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2540532. PMID:
40787752
- Aamann IC, Erlik M. Sundhed, kropsvægt, klasse.
Dansk Pædagogisk Tidsskrift 2024(4):6-21.
- Erlik M, Timm H, Larsen ATS, Quist M. Reasons for non-participation in cancer rehabilitation: a scoping literature review. Support Care Cancer 2024;32(6):346. doi:
10.1007/s00520-024-08553-9.
- Aamann IC, Erlik M. ‘Am I that bad?’: Middle-class moralism and weight stigma towards parents of children with higher weight. Child Soc 2023;37(6):1737-1753. doi: 10.1111/chso.12779.
- Erlik M. Vægtens magt: hvad sker der, når vi lader BMI diktere sundhed? Diætisten 2020;28(168):11-13.