Toward Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts, and Environments in and Beyond the Biosocial Sciences

Abstract Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars conducting research in Bangladesh, China, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States as they reflect on the un/making of kin in settings of expert knowledge production and dissemination, including practices of seed collecting, epigenetic science, birth cohort studies, social policy generation, and clinical trials. Contributors to this special issue consider how intergenerational relations and modes of transmission take form in and through biosocial research—both as an object of study and a method of analysis. intergenerational, environmental change, kinship, biosocial