Nostos Salon 06
A monthly gathering of good food, drinks, and conversation—where anthropology meets community in an engaging, accessible way.
Anthropology of Care and Embodiment with Dr Aaron J. Jackson
Our upcoming Nostos gathering turns its attention to something we all do and almost never talk about: the work of care.
The weight we don't name
Independence gets celebrated. Productivity gets rewarded. Care, more often than not, gets pushed into the private sphere and framed as a burden, something to be managed rather than a relationship in its own right. This conversation asks us to look again. Care is a deeply human, embodied, social phenomenon. It shapes who we are, how we relate, and how we live together, whether we ever say its name or not.
Anthropology gives us a way in. Across family life, support services, disability and loss, particular ways of relating to one another take shape through the everyday practice of caring. What does it mean to care with and through the body? How do moral commitments, emotional labour and daily routines reshape identity itself, including ideas of gender, masculinity and responsibility? And what happens when we bring close, ethnographic attention to lived experience, rather than the dominant scripts we've inherited about dependency, autonomy and worth?
We're delighted to welcome Aaron J. Jackson, Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University, whose work lives at the intersection of care, embodiment and cognitive disability. Drawing on ethnography, life history and narrative analysis, Aaron is the author of Worlds of Care (University of California Press, 2021), an ethnographic monograph following the moral and emotional lives of fathers raising children with cognitive disabilities in the United States. His research sits inside major debates in care theory and the anthropology of disability, and extends into longitudinal work on disability support accommodation and rights-based initiatives including My Rights Matter.
An afternoon in the open
No panel, no podium. This salon is an open, reflective dialogue, an invitation to sit with how care actually moves through bodies, relationships and institutions, in all its complexity, vulnerability and quiet creativity.
Because attending to care properly, rather than glancing past it, might be one of the more direct paths we have to understanding interdependence, and to reimagining the ethical ground collective life stands on.
Special thanks to NON and NOW Wines for supporting this event.
Readings and Resources via this months Zine
“There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to reach out. People need to be lifted up.
― Alice Wong