RESEARCH SEMINAR: Christine Sargent

Speaker: Christine Sargent, University of Denver

Abstract: This talk draws on ethnographic research with mothers of children with Down syndrome in Amman, Jordan, where Down syndrome increasingly coheres as a disability identity. I situate mothers as an entry point for understanding how practices of care make Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities through the momentum of kinship futures. These futures, imagined and enacted through the prism of kin roles and relations, shape how families enact care under conditions of intensifying economic and political precarity.

Bio: Christine Sargent is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research interests lie at the intersections of disability, aging, kinship, and bioethics in Southwest Asia and North Africa and North America. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan and her BA in Middle East Studies from Pomona College.