Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies
Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies
Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies is an emerging social action movement and methodology that bridges the academic-community divide while supporting the leadership of ED-labeled/identifying and otherwise oppressed people. This community-led approach examines “eating orders” as a cultural phenomena, which is fundamentally different from studying eating disorders as a biological, social, psychological, feminist, or other type of “problem.” We have named doing this type of analysis “eating order theorizing.”
​
Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies as a collective shares an overtly political objective of futures where joyful and fulfilling relationships with our bodies and food are commonplace and evenly accessible among diverse groups of people.
Meet Our Team.
The dream team
Lucy Aphramor
They/Qwe
Lucy is a queer, mad, radical dietitian and poet with class, thin- and white-bodied privileges. Qwe have previously worked as a dietitian in the UK National Health Service, third sector, and independently, and now hold a research post in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, UK.
Lucy’s practice and scholarship is shaped by a commitment to breaking silences and co-creating knowledge that is useful to communities who are excluded from, or otherwise harmed by, public health nutrition messages and the ideologies these endorse and mobilise. Qwe use a feminist, anti-colonial praxis that engages queering as process, embracing arts-based inquiry and making space for non-rational ways of knowing.
Framing learning and healing as entangled endeavours that serve collective flourishing and that occur across time, Lucy acknowledges the dietetic lineage is rooted in coloniality, a violence that endures today through scientific imperialism. Qwe practice responds to this by seeking to disrupt tropes such as Modernity, Purity, Perfectionism, Speciesm, Universalism, anti-Blackness and more through an unrecovery model tied to an ethics of care and repair to imagine and enact a politicised trauma-wise, earth-honouring, fat, and trans affirming world.
Faith Stadnyk
She/her
Faith Stadnyk (she/her) is a feminist disability, fat studies, and critical eating dis/order studies researcher whose work marks and challenges white supremacy, ableism, sanism, fatmisia, healthism, (settler) colonialism, and intersecting modes of oppression in health activism, healthcare, health promotion, and well-being related landscapes. She is a white, settler, fat, disabled, neurodivergent, and queer woman living and working on the unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territories. Faith is committed to knowledge production that calls for radical social change that benefits all marginalized people, especially those living in the intersections of multiple systems of oppression.
Nicole Schott
She/They
Nicole Schott (she/they) works as a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador at the School of Social Work. She held a Postdoctoral position in Critical Mental Health Equity and Community-Engaged Research at McMaster University. Nicole has a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto and an MA in Criminology from Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford Campus.
Nicole has been impacted by “eating dis/order” phenomena for as long as she can remember, and as an activist-artist-researcher, she has been doing Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies as methodology for over a decade. From a critical eating dis/order studies perspective, Nicole Madly questions eating orders across peoples, places and time periods, and unmaps the connections (in)between while in conversation with critical academics, artists, and community coalizers across mad studies, fat studies, affect theorizing, food studies, Indigenous knowledges, post-human philosophies, and performance studies, to name a few.
Nicole transformed her eating dis/order scholarship into the play called “Pro-Anorexia/Bulimia Embedded” (Co-created with playwright Lauren Spring, Director Clara McBride and a talented acting ensemble). She transformed the post-performance audience feedback into the poem “Under the Psychiatric Treatment Regime: The Impossibility Paradoxes of Eating Disorder Recovery." Nicole and Julia Janes are currently collaborating with local dramaturg and director Santiago Guzmán to transform this research-infused poetry into a multi-sensorial performance for various audiences in St. John’s Newfoundland.
Nicole is currently co-building critical eating dis/order studies as a transdisciplinary project and international community-network to resist, and move beyond, systemic eating orders across abolitionist struggles. She welcomes others to join our community’s Eating Order Resistance Collective!
Anastasia Dimas
She/her
Anastasia, a social sciences student at the University of Toronto, is a passionate advocate, learner, and supporter of the fat-activism movement. Within her studies, she delves into the examination of societal systems where oppressions manifest, particularly focusing on the pervasive thin-centric culture that prevails in our society.
Both within and beyond her academic community, Anastasia is an active Health at Every Size and Anti-Diet advocate. She is dedicated to continual learning, finding inspiration from her peers in the fields of fatphobia and eating disorders through reading, listening, and engaging in discussions.
Having previously volunteered with the Recovery Project Foundation, Anastasia aims to expand her activism in Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies. She contributes her administrative and design expertise to the team, focusing on website and social media design, while also fostering an environment of inclusivity and anti-fatphobia within her role.
Grateful for the opportunity to collaborate within the collective, Anastasia cherishes the teamwork dynamic. In her administrative capacity, she remains committed to upholding an anti-fatphobia and anti-discriminatory stance.
Outside of her academic and professional endeavors, Anastasia enjoys pursuing creative hobbies such as crocheting and painting, all while continuing her activism work.
Debra Langan
She/Her
Debra Langan is a sociologist and Associate Professor in Wilfrid Laurier University’s Department of Criminology, situated on the Haldimand Tract of the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Neutral peoples. Debra’s research has focused primarily on analyzing the complexities of police cultures, gendered violence, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Qualitative methodologies and critical theorizing guide her action research and ‘constructive pedagogy’ (Langan, Sheese, & Davidson 2009). Her recent journal publications appear in: Feminist Criminology; Policing and Society; Women & Criminal Justice; Gender & Society; Journal of Applied Social Science; Studies in Social Justice; Media, Culture & Society; Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Deviant Behavior.
Debra’s interest in “Critical Eating Dis/Order Studies” dates back to 2012 when she became Nicole Schott’s Masters thesis supervisor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, Canada. The thesis research explored online forums where individuals discussed themselves and/or others in relation to ideologies and practices involving ‘eating dis/orders,’ in this context broadly referred to as ‘pro-ana’ (supporting anorexia) and ‘pro-mia’ (supporting bulimia). Through an examination of these online discussions, critical feminist theorizing, and our personal experiences in everyday life, we came to identify how conceptions of, and responses to, eating dis/orders are embedded in cultural, social, and political contexts. Our collaborations continue to this day, across academic, artistic, community, professional, and personal arenas (e.g., Schott & Langan, “Moving Beyond ‘Recovery’: Exposing and Disrupting the Eating Dis/Order Industrial Complex,” Forthcoming in International Mad Studies Journal).
Sarah Redikopp
She/her
Sarah Redikopp (she/her) is a critical scholar working at the intersections of feminist disability and mad studies. Redikopp’s research mobilizes critical narrative and cultural analysis to engage with lived experiences of self-harm as sites of mad and intersectional feminist theorizing, and works to engender deeply situated, relational, and politicized accounts of what becomes understood as self-harm in contemporary western contexts. Redikopp’s work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Studies in Social Justice, Sociology of Health and Illness, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Routledge Handbook of Political Economy of Health and Word and Text. Redikopp is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto.
Julia Janes
Julia Elizabeth Janes is a disabled, White, settler assistant professor of social working at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador situated on the unceded lands of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq. Julia’s scholarship and activisms centre decolonizing and mad praxes, community/university engagements -- particularly with Indigenous communities, social work as harm reduction, and arts-infused, critical and poststructural methodologies.
As a human, Julia’s entry point into dis/ordering eating began with a long arc of matriarchal histories of affect laden eating. As an activist academic, Julia enters into theorizing Eating Orders through Foucault’s governmentality entangled with decolonizing approaches to eating as spirit, culture, and connection to the ‘more than humans’ we call food. Although relatively new to disordering eating orders, Julia brings a diverse lived expertise of art-full transformation praxes to this collective. Julia was invited into this collective and to various EO centred research projects by generous colleagues and friends Nicole Schott and Bren LeFrançois, leaders in Critical Eating Dis/Orders Studies and Mad Studies.
When not eating, foraging for, reading, and dreaming about food, Julia can be found swimming in the cool waters of Ktaqmkuk and Rama First Nation.
Katie Fortune
Katie is a second-year Ph.D. student at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Sociology (formally), with a heavy influence from Gender Studies. Her work surrounds fat women and AFAB individuals in sex work and kink. She hopes to explore the unique agentic possibilities for radical body acceptance and the role of affective labour in the spaces. Her past work has focused on the effects of weight stigma on young women during COVID-19. She comes to eating order resistance and fat studies through lived experience and a passion for fighting against body control and anti-fat sentiment. She looks forward to working and growing with the collective.
Julie Reynolds
Julie is a dedicated Person-Centred Psychotherapist who embarked on a transformative journey from a successful marketing career to re-train as a psychotherapist.
Motivated by a profound empathy for individuals grappling with misunderstood issues related to food and body, she sought to provide compassionate care, soon realising the existing frameworks on this were insufficient.
Julie observed a crucial missing element—social justice and an acknowledgment of the significance of trauma. In navigating this gap, she discovered the Client-Centred approach founded by Carl Rogers. This philosophy resonated with her deeply, allowing her to blend it with her own convictions in the healing power of equality, non-judgment, and profound empathy.
Julie's practice is also shaped by radical thinkers including Lucy Aphramor and Peggy Natiello. Her commitment to an inclusive therapeutic approach that recognises the entanglement of the personal and structural, means her work inherently challenges norms and principles taken for granted in mainstream spaces, breaking silences about iatrogenic harm - notably fat hate - and troubling expectations of professional complicity with the status quo.
Shira Collings
She/they
Shira Collings, MS, NCC, LPC (she/they) is a Jewish, queer, Mad psychotherapist primarily specializing in eating disorders, disordered eating, and body image. As a diet culture dropout herself, Shira is passionate about supporting others in finding freedom with food and body acceptance. Her therapeutic approach is informed by Health At Every Size and fat liberation, queer and trans liberation, and disability justice.
Shira has a background in Mad and neurodivergent activism. In addition to their work as a therapist, they are the Grant Coordinator for the National Empowerment Center, a psychiatric survivor/peer led organization, and previously they worked at the critical psychiatry web magazine Mad in America. They have also co-authored research on mental health activism as well as impacts of carceral responses to mental health crisis.
Additionally, Shira is trained and certified as a Jewish Lifecycle Ceremonialist. She loves providing fat affirming and Mad affirming ceremonies to honor life transitions of all kinds, including not only weddings and funerals but also less often commemorated experiences including gender transition, discovery of Mad or neurodivergent identity, rejection of diet culture/embracing fatness, infertility and pregnancy loss, deciding to be childfree, and even pet adoption.
Shira lives in Philadelphia with her husband, their two adopted cats, and a rotating crew of foster kitties.
You can learn more about Shira’s therapeutic work here and her ceremony work here.