Reproducing queer subjects in UK biosocial birth cohort research
Join this event to hear Taylor Riley discuss new biopossibilities, researching queer erasure and hypervisibility in UK birth cohort research.
Reproducing queer subjects in UK biosocial birth cohort research
10 Oct 2024, 12:00 – 13:00
Contemporary UK birth cohort research is the result of a unique history which has both entrenched and sought to combat social inequalities and health disparities. Yet queer and trans research subjects may still face being disappeared in the data.
Discussing observations from research on an intergenerational birth cohort study, Taylor looks to highlight the data collection practices that affect queer, and what she terms queered birth cohort research participants.
Historically limited options for quantifying ‘family’ on study questionnaires and lack of clarity regarding who ‘counts’ in research, literally in terms of statistics and figuratively in terms of value, means that queer families and non-genetic relatives ‘queered’ by boundaries of ‘the family’ within research, have at times faced erasure. Conversely, there is potential for the hypervisibility of ‘good’ queer subjects who may help ensure a study’s financial viability.
This in-person event will be particularly useful for those interested in biosocial research, birth cohort data, anthropology, and queer studies.
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Taylor Riley
Postdoctoral research fellow in Anthropology
UCL
She has a background in queer anthropology with a focus on South Africa and has worked as a lecturer in medical anthropology at the University of California Irvine. She is currently working as a part of a team under PI Sahra Gibbon on the Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts project funded by the Wellcome Trust, a comparative ethnographic project researching four birth cohort studies in the UK, Netherlands, Portugal, and Brazil.
She is interested in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the history of medicine, queer kinship, and assisted reproductive technologies.