Birth cohort studies follow participants and their families by tracking and recording social and biological data to understand and improve health across the generations. In this exhibition, as part of the Wellcome Trust funded project The Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts, the life worlds of participants across four cohorts in the Global North and South are compared to illuminate the everyday processes and practices that shape their lives.

By recruiting pregnant mothers during a particular time span, birth cohorts are representative not just of the location but also the generations that follow, differences that we highlight in the four participating cohorts: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children in Bristol, UK; the Pelotas Cohort Study in Pelotas, Brazil; the Generation R study in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the Generation 21 study in Porto, Portugal.

In 2024-2025, using a method called ‘photovoice’, we invited 21 intergenerational parent and participant pairs from these four participating cohorts to take pictures of their lives, and then to discuss these in small focus groups. This website show cases this work providing a visual and audio immersion into the life worlds of a diverse group of participants and their parents, aged 18 to their 60s. Through their images and narratives we see how their lives are sometimes influenced by their involvement in the cohort studies but also often exceed it, as they reveal what is important to them and the details that shape their lives.

We hope the exhibition on this website and that will run in all four cohort locations and London in 2026, go some way to understanding what it means to be a birth cohort participant in these very different parts of the world, whilst also helping us to re-think and re-imagine what cohort participation is or could be.