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Rikke Sand Andersen

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Professor

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Rikke Sand Andersen

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I am a medical anthropologist with a long-term interest in bodies as sites of knowledge, governance, and lived experience. My research has primarily focused on conventional biomedicine in Western societies, including cancer and family medicine. A particular focus has been the rise of accelerated clinical pathways, and how these inform everyday forms of bodily awareness and contribute to social inequalities in health. Together with Marie Louise Tørring and a group of PhD and postdoctoral researchers, I co-edited Cancer Entangled: Acceleration, Anticipation and the Danish StateMy current research interests revolve around global rise in solo living. Specifically, I am researching solo living as an embodied and relational condition, focusing on solitude as both vulnerability and potential. As more people live and age alone, everyday life unfolds without the assumed presence of a co-resident partner, reshaping experiences of illness, care, and responsibility. I am particularly interested in how shifts in care and what has been described as a “care crisis” in welfare states may intensify uncertainty while also fostering new forms of moral agency and relations. Rather than equating solitude with loneliness, my colleagues and I investigate how aloneness is lived, experienced, and made meaningful in shifting landscapes of care and kinship.

Teaching: My position is shared between the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Department of Public Health, Research Unit for General Practice, and the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University (AU), where I teach across both institutions. I supervise master students, and currently my teaching includes electives in medical anthropology, an interdisciplinary summer school on health inequalities in welfare societies, and a large course on aging and gerontology. The latter two are developed in collaboration with colleagues from nutrition science, epigenetics, and clinical medicine, reflecting my commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration.

Currently I serve as a board member of the Danish Society for Health Anthropology and as co-director of the Health Research Programme at the School of Culture and Society, alongside Rasmus Dyring. I am also a member of the editorial board for the book series Transformations in Medical Anthropology (Palgrave Macmillan).

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