‘Shade trees for the next generation’: constructing the promissory publics of prospective cohort studies

ABSTRACT

Epidemiological cohort studies are a central research design in public health which appeal to, and can reinforce, specific ideas of the nation, sociality and the ‘good’ citizen. The concept of publics, the sociology of expectations and a co-productionist framework provide the theoretical frame to investigate how popular representations of two cohort studies, German National Cohort and UK Biobank, attempt to enrol a concerned public. By constructing promissory publics, cohort studies produce morally charged visions of health research and civic engagement as normative social practices. Promissory publics straddle the population and the citizen, the nation and the region, the future and the past, thus adding nuance to existing conceptual approaches. The publics of cohort studies are bolstered by the care practices of predominantly female staff, functioning as a performance of social recognition in lieu of an immediate beneficiary of research participation. Through these processes, popular representations of cohort studies intervene into much broacher visions of society and its anticipated futures, co-producing socially dominant and morally charged projections of sociality as well as health. The production of such publics thereby draws boundaries between members of the public and those practices enacted as endangering civic values. As such, cohort studies may have much broader socio-cultural ramifications that could reinforce old or reintroduce new lines of inclusion or exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Cohort studies
• publics
• sociology of expectations
• socio-technical imaginaries
• German National Cohort
• UK Biobank

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2023.2267826)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [grant number 01GL1710A].

Notes on contributors

Sibille Merz

Sibille Merz holds a PhD in sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandenburg Medical School. Her main research interests include the social dimensions of biomedical and epidemiological research, the construction of differences in biomedicine (especially race and gender), global health inequities, and qualitative methods.

Philipp Jaehn

Philipp Jaehn is a medical doctor and epidemiologist with an MSc from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His main areas of research include quantitative research methods, social epidemiology, and epidemiology of non-communicable diseases.

Christine Holmberg

Christine Holmberg is a full professor of social medicine and epidemiology at the Brandenburg Medical School Theodor Fontane. Her research aims to understand the effects of epidemiological knowledge production on medical practice, communities, and patients' experiences. As a trained anthropologist and epidemiologist, Prof. Holmberg works at the crossroads of phenomenological and epidemiological research, bringing them together for a profound understanding of how our world is shaped and how individuals are situated in particular ways within this world.