Christine Sargent

CHRISTINE SARGENT, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “Kinship Futures: Motherhood and the Making of Down Syndrome in Urban Jordan.” This project traces how kinship and gender shape the intertwined lives — and futures – of disabled and nondisabled kin. Situating Down syndrome as an outcome of everyday embodied practices of care, the book uses the analytic of “making” to approach impairment and disability as intersubjective negotiations that transform over life course and historical time. It is informed by fieldwork with families, educators, therapists, activists, and policymakers in Jordan’s capital city of Amman, but it focuses on the experiences of mothers who play key roles in Jordan’s kinship-based and gendered care economy. It uses their perspectives as an entry point for understanding how intersections of patriarchy and ableism link kin through intimacy and hierarchy. Dynamics of temporality and relationality guide the book’s structure, with chapters mirroring the arc of an imagined (and idealized) life course. This progression shows how families make Down syndrome as they age through shifting kin roles, grappling with expectations to give and receive care over time and under increasingly difficult political and economic circumstances. Making Down Syndrome will be published in January 2026 as part of the Medical Anthropology series at Rutgers University Press