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Paper short abstract

In this paper, I situate Down syndrome as a lens for exploring "vital disjunctures" of chronicity. By this I mean to highlight how embodied, social, and moral dimensions of aging serve to mark - and unmark - disability over a lifetime.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I situate Down syndrome as a lens for exploring "vital disjunctures" of chronicity. By this I mean to highlight how embodied, social, and moral dimensions of aging serve to mark - and unmark - disability over a lifetime. To do so, I focus on how specificities of Down syndrome, a chronic (and congenital) condition, sometimes surged into the foreground and otherwise receded out of focus for families living in Amman, Jordan. Aging relationally, with and without Down syndrome, contradictions of chronicity ebbed and flowed as families attempted to navigate shifting expectations and demands of care. I use the concept of 'vital disjunctures' in conversation with that of a "vital conjuncture," or "a socially structured zone of possibility that emerges around specific periods of potential transformation in a life or lives" (Johnson-Hanks 2002, 871). By vital disjunctures, I mean to emphasize how these zones of possibility and transformation, when viewed relationally (at the family level) and comparatively (across family units), create disjunctive experiences and outcomes. Vital disjunctures reveal how the contradictions and instabilities of chronic conditions extend beyond individual bodily boundaries and life trajectories, even as their unequal effects also concentrate in individual life stories and pathways (or paths curtailed).