The Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts (360G-Wellcome-219844_Z_19_Z)

This four year project examines birth cohorts as sites of knowledge, practice and participation in the UK, Europe and Latin America. It aims to understand how they provide an infrastructure for and are a technology of biosocial science. It is the first study to take birth cohorts as an object of ethnographic inquiry in comparative national contexts. In an era of post-genomics, studies that follow research participants over their lifetimes have become vital to understanding how material and social environments ‘get under the skin’ and are dynamically shaped across the lifecourse. This is increasingly described as ‘biosocial science’, reflecting the importance to this field of the interaction between social and biological factors. Whilst a notion of the biosocial is not new, singular nor uncontested it is now being re-shaped in global research terrains with longitudinal cohort studies as important tools and technologies. By examining the ‘biosocial lives’ of birth cohorts in the global north and south, I will provide insight on the socio-cultural specificity of these developments. Comparison will inform theorisation of what the biosocial is, whilst an ethnographic perspective will facilitate methodological innovation in examining and intervening on birth cohort research and how biosocial science is coming into being.