Associated with UCSF since 2021 | mikala.erlik@regionh.dk / erlik.mikala@gmail.com
Mikala Erlik is an anthropologist and PhD candidate at the Center for Clinical Research and Prevention, UCSF, Rigshospitalet, affiliated with 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
Mikala's PhD project examines everyday life among people with lung cancer who have not participated in cancer rehabilitation. Lung cancer is a diagnosis surrounded by powerful cultural and social imaginaries concerning blame, lifestyle, and who belongs within the offerings of the healthcare system. People with lung cancer living at a distance from the institutional spaces of rehabilitation constitute a group about whom remarkably little is known, despite representing one of the most socially and health-wise vulnerable populations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the project seeks to understand these people's experiences on their own terms, as lived lives with their own logics and conditions. The aim is to build a better foundation for understanding those who live these lives, and in doing so, contribute to more equitable relations between people with lung cancer and the healthcare system they encounter.
The project is funded by UCSF and partly by the Danish Cancer Society, and is carried out in collaboration with EXHALE & Copenhagen Centre for Cancer and Health.
Background
Before her academic career, Mikala Erlik worked as a social pedagogue/worker, 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 life 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. Alongside fieldwork and writing, Mikala works with visual art. Oil paintings and field sketches form an integrated part of her research practice and are used as illustrations in her dissertation.
Publications
- 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.