ICL Contributing Scholar, Fall 2025

As a sociocultural and medical anthropologist, I ask questions about how different ways of practicing human interdependence are connected to large scale social changes like population aging, and how these forms of interdependence generate social difference and inequality across the life course. To answer these questions, I conduct ethnographic research with older adults and their close relations in the United States to understand how they adapt to changing circumstances. In the process, I foreground aging and care as complex processes of relational and social experimentation. My first book, Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (2018, NYU Press­) was awarded an Eileen Basker Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2020. Inequalities of Aging argues that the paid home care work that enables some older Americans to live independently both generates and relies on entanglements between deeply embodied moral commitments and profound social inequalities. With colleagues, I am also working to develop a comparative approach to theorizing care, which analyzes care as one among many cultural and historical frameworks for understanding, evaluating, and organizing human interdependence.