Erica Janko

Erica Janko’s research focuses on how the structural devaluation of care in the United States shapes people’s everyday experiences as they live their lives, build community, and navigate care systems. She teaches courses on health and medicine, work, care, and the body.

Janko’s current book-length project, Aging with Care, follows elder care from the halls of a county senior center to the halls of the state legislature in a region widely known for being one of the best places to age in the United States. She finds that under these ideal conditions, even well-resourced older adults and their loved ones struggled to access quality care. Drawing on three years of ethnographic data and 77 in-depth interviews with older adults, care partners, and aging advocates, this project examines how people with relative privilege—and relative power—respond to a care system they know is broken.

Janko is also beginning work on her next book-length project – this time at the other end of the life course. About four percent of adolescents develop unexplained curvature of the spine, but the accepted treatment – years of painful bracing often followed by surgical spinal fusion – has remained largely ineffective in preventing future complications since the mid-20th century. It is no coincidence that most adolescents undergoing this treatment are girls. Rooted in autoethnography, oral history, archival research, and arts-based participatory methods, this project traces the gendered treatment and diagnosis of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis in the United States and its impact on current and former patients.

Alongside her written work, Janko brings together theory and embodied practice in her work as a dance artist. In her fieldwork on aging, she used dance as a pathway for connection with research participants, facilitating movement classes with older adults, care partners, and people living with dementia. As part of this work, Janko developed a choreographic arts-based participatory research method that centers movement as a means for social inquiry.

Janko’s research has been published in Sociological Perspectives and New Media & Society. She has presented choreographic work in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. and has performed and facilitated movement workshops across the East Coast. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Janko received the university’s Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants and the Department of Sociology’s Wilson Teaching Award. The UNC-Chapel Hill Provost’s office has called her an “inspiring, joyful, and deeply impactful teacher.”