Paper short abstract:

This talk shares work in progress from Trajectories, a qualitative sub-study of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI).

Paper long abstract:

This talk shares work in progress from Trajectories, a qualitative sub-study of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI). In partnership with the World Health Organisation, HeLTI is a consortium of randomised controlled trials in China, Canada, India, and South Africa that aims to provide gold standard evidence of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a multicomponent life course intervention from preconception to early childhood for the prevention of childhood obesity and optimisation of reproductive health and early childhood development. Working closely with HeLTI South Africa, Trajectories engages experimental methods for transformative knowledge-making through integrating multidisciplinary and social science approaches. In this talk I discuss the opportunities and challenges of our work, which includes institutional ethnography that uses biosocial models to work collaboratively with trial scientists, and novel qualitative longitudinal methodologies that actively broker new experimental forms of engagement with trial participants. I discuss the HeLTI- Trajectories collaboration as an important experiment both in the epidemiological sense and, drawing on the work of Fitzgerald and Callard, as a site of experiment as practice and ethos, or in the words of the panel abstract, an opportunity for “reimagining the experimental.”