In recent years birth cohorts have become an invaluable context, resource, tool and ‘technology’ of an emerging terrain of biosocial science, given the unique opportunity they provide to study how the life course is intergenerationally shaped. As many contributors for this series have highlighted, the what and how of biological and social transmission between kin are of central concern in cohort studies (Roberts 2019), even if this is sometimes often intensely focused on ‘mother-child’ dyads and early developmental stages of the life course (Lappe and Hein 2020), or singular kinds of social exposure, such as early adversity (Lloyd 2020, Kim 2020). Drawing on pilot study research with a small group of cohort participants from a UK based regional birth cohort, we reflect further on what Janelle Lamoreaux has called ‘cohort kinship’ (2019) by examining what it means to become intergenerational in birth cohorts. In doing so, we illuminate how both the ‘doing and being’ (McKinnon 2016) of kinship is temporally entangled with the (re)making of cohort participation. Here we extend recent social science work examining the relevance of relatedness and kinship to the meaning and experience of cohort participation and kinds of biosocial research carried out in birth cohort studies (Cruz et al forthcoming Kalender and Holmberg 2019). We see this as part of a wider effort to resituate kinship in studies of scientific practice (Carsten 2019) and re-invigorate what Gibbon and Lamoreaux (forthcoming) have termed ‘Intergenerational Ethnography’ in examining the making and unmaking of kin within and beyond the biosocial sciences
