Re-thinking Participation in Birth Cohorts

This half day conference provides an opportunity for diverse academics and researchers who work with longitudinal birth cohort studies to come together to reflect and discuss the important but often neglected issue of “participation” in birth cohort studies.

Longitudinal birth cohorts, which follow participants and their families all their lives, have been and are an invaluable research resource, yet the question of what it means to be a lifelong participant is underexamined. Our half day conference aims to open new avenues for considering this valued and vital form of research participation and the new challenges and opportunities that come through re-thinking what it means to be a birth cohort participant.

Our half day public conference will include presentations from the Directors of two leading birth cohort studies in the UK and a social scientist who has worked for over 20 years with the Pelotas Birth Cohort Study in Brazil.

Talks – followed by a Q and A – will include the following:

• Professor Rosie McEachan:
  “Born in Bradford – can a research project change a city? Reflecting on 18 years of evidence, engagement and impact”
  (Director of Born in Bradford, Bradford Institute for Health Research)
• Professor Alissa Goodman:
  “Generation New Era – a new nationally representative birth cohort study for the UK”
  (Co-Director of Generation New Era and Co-Director of Population Research UK, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies)
• Associate Professor Dominique Behague:
  “From Critique to Repair: Rethinking Co-Production in the 1982 Pelotas Birth Cohort”
  (Dept of Medicine, Health and Society, Vanderbilt University)

The end of the day will culminate in the Photovoice exhibition launch of the “Lifeworlds of Birth Cohorts”, which showcases research undertaken by UCL researchers with birth cohort participants in Generation R in Rotterdam, ALSPAC in Bristol, Generation 21 in Porto and the Pelotas Birth Cohort Study in Pelotas.

Drawing from the creative engagement of birth cohort participants themselves, the exhibition comparatively explores what it means to be a participant in these four regional locations. It showcases the intricacies of daily life for cohort participants across the global north and south and the similarities and diversities of lives across generations, providing a window to help reimagine what cohort participation is or could be.

The conference will end with a reception.

These events are organised by Sahra Gibbon, Carola Tize, Tatiane Muniz and Taylor Riley based in the Anthropology Department at UCL, and are part of the Wellcome Trust funded project “The Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts”. The conference is organised with the support of Simmy Mpofu (Events Coordinator) and Anna Betts (Exhibition Designer).

All are welcome but sign up is essential to ensure your place. Please sign up via Eventbrite.

For more information about these events please contact Simmy Mpofu at simmy.mpofu@ucl.ac.uk.