Overview

Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan draws on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Jordan’s capital city of Amman to explore how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities. They do so through the momentum of kinship futures, or futures imagined through the prism of kinship roles and relations, which shape how families organize and distribute care between and beyond kinship networks and under conditions of economic and political uncertainty. By approaching everyday life in Jordan through the lends of disability, Making Down Syndrome offers new insights into how people navigate structures of family, gender, power, inequality, and precarity, all while trying to maintain hope for and cultivate better futures.

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9781978841024

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Reviews

""A powerful study of kinship, disability, gender and care. Through painstaking ethnographic research, Sargent sheds light on the moral rubrics that communities draw upon as they navigate the care of children with Down syndrome. In the process, the author expands and deepens the scholarship on disability in the region appreciably."" --Fida Adely ""author of Working Women in Jordan: Education, Migration, and Aspiration"" ""Sargent powerfully analyzes interworldly networks and temporalities of care to demonstrate how Down syndrome in Jordan is produced and sustained relationally and interdependently through kinship futures."" --Michele Friedner ""author of Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India""

Author Information

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, as well as in North America.

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