Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnography of birth cohort research, the paper examines realities, tensions, and silences around class and race found in the lifeworld of longitudinal research participation in the UK during times of inequalities, crises, and violence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper thinks through participation in longitudinal biosocial research (the ALSPAC birth cohort) amid the current cost of living crisis and this past summer’s waves of racialised violence. As well as an examination of the historical context which led to the cohort's existence, the contemporary lifeworld of the cohort study provides a unique location to consider these from in that the study population, recruited from 1991-1992, both no longer reflects the demographics of Bristol and has seen disproportionate attrition over time along axes of marginalisation. Doing research with people varyingly affected by crises in a city of demographic shifts, middle-class gentrification, and classed and racialised spatial politics, is complexified by cultural and bureaucratic quiet when it comes to socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. The ghosts and geopolitics of medical research which is regional, intergenerational, and biosocial are hidden in plain sight. In this paper, which informs a larger manuscript, I consider these historically and as I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Bristol studying the cohort and its catchment area. Reflecting on a series of photovoice focus groups with intergenerational ALSPAC participants in summer 2024 provides one entry point to analysing these realities, tensions, and silences.