Critical developmental science: life course trajectories in the 1982 Pelotas birth cohort study

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The project explores how developmental norms presumed to be generalizable are reproduced, challenged, and sometimes disrupted within scientific and activist communities. Based on an ethnographic study, the project will elucidate how developmental diversity takes shape. The project will benefit diverse stakeholders, including the scientific community, policymakers, educators, healthcare practitioners, and community organizations. Beyond academic outputs, the project will generate a one-of-a-kind longitudinal ethnographic database, a white paper on interdisciplinary and participatory research methods, and an accessible infrastructure for scientists, especially early career researchers, to engage with ethnographically grounded science studies. This project integrates perspectives from science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, developmental sciences, and a community advisory board to form a critical developmental science—an interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive, and socially responsible approach to studying human development. As the first cohort study with a focus on the Global South, it examines developmental diversity over 35 years, and innovates in three key areas. Firstly, it will generate new conceptual tools for understanding development in a non-Euro-American context, challenging the pathologization of difference. Secondly, it explores the reasons for the gap between awareness of the need for culturally sensitive developmental knowledge and its broader uptake, examining how values related to normal/abnormal distinctions and hierarchies of worthiness endure. Thirdly, to better theorize change, it builds on how local stakeholders use critical theory in mainstream science, policy, and public debate, studying how expert, activist, and vernacular forms of critique and reflexivity work in practice. By showcasing the collaborative making of critical developmental science with a focus on the Global South, this research will contribute to the flow of knowledge from South to North. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.