Conference Speakers
James Downs is a writer, researcher, advocate, educator, facilitator, therapist, and creative practitioner from Wales. Like any of us, his biography cannot be reduced to a single role or identity. It has evolved over time and has been shaped in profound ways by more than 20 years of lived experience of severe anorexia and bulimia. James’s work sits at the intersection of eating disorders, mental health, ethics, and lived experience.
Over the past five years, he has published around 75 academic papers spanning eating disorders specifically and mental health more broadly, across clinical, research, and humanities-informed contexts. His writing has explored subjects including recovery, treatment, prevention, service design, evidence synthesis, and the assumptions that shape how illness, care, and expertise are understood. A consistent thread running through his work is a commitment to bringing fragmented parts of the field into conversation, amplifying underrepresented populations and neglected questions, and challenging ideas that have too often been taken for granted.
2027 Keynote Speaker:
James Downs
Alongside his academic and professional work, creative practice is central to how James experiences and responds to the world. Music, movement, and fine art are not separate from his way of thinking, but part of it: for him, meaning-making is sensory, relational, and embodied. This informs both his understanding of care and his approach to dialogue, research, and change. In a field that can so often become divided into separate languages, priorities, and forms of knowledge, James is interested in how we might weave these strands together more carefully and more humanely. His work speaks to the possibility of weaving a tapestry of care: one that is more connected, more inclusive, and more able to hold complexity.
