This five year project will examine the biosocial lives of birth cohorts as forms of knowledge, sites of social practice and trajectories of participation. Whilst biosocial research, which is concerned with the interaction of biological and social factors, is not new it is being re-invigorated in an era of ‘post-genomics’. Epigenetic and other omic related fields of inquiry are revealing the vital role played by environment and social context for health outcomes by focusing on the biological consequences, pathways and mechanisms of social exposures during the life-course. This project will explore how and in what ways birth cohorts are technologies of and for biosocial research. Longitudinal studies that follow the lives of participants and their families have become central to identifying and understanding how the social ‘gets under the skin’, making them important but, as yet, under researched arenas in social science for examining the social practices, cultural contexts and consequences of biosocial research.

Taking six regional birth cohorts from internationally diverse contexts (including ALSPAC) as an object of and subject for ethnographic inquiry we will generate in-depth anthropologically rich comparative accounts of the dynamics between birth cohorts and biosocial research within the global north and south (including South Africa, China, Latin America and Europe). At the same time we will develop methodological innovation in using ethnography as an intervention on biosocial knowledge aiming to make a neglected social science research tool an essential component of interdisciplinary life-course research.