In this introduction to the Handbook of DOHaD and Society, we provide an overview of the biosocial research field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We first trace the evolution of this interdisciplinary field over the past two decades, charting the historical conditions that have brought DOHaD to a critical moment when the field is at a threshold of interdisciplinary innovation across both life and social sciences. We then discuss the biosocial perspective that DOHaD offers as its central premise and promise, allowing for questions of socio-environmental justice, discrimination, and equity to be centred in science and biomedicine. We explore the challenges that complicate this biosocial agenda in practice and attend to questions of research translation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the socio-cultural dimensions of DOHaD-based health interventions. We end by highlighting the transformational potential of the DOHaD research paradigm and how this handbook offers a toolkit for robust interdisciplinary research in this field.

Human intervention studies are gaining traction and recognition in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) field. Since DOHaD intervention studies will most frequently use complex public health interventions, collaborations across science and social science disciplines are critical for obtaining and interpreting DOHaD evidence in ways that matter for policy recommendation. This chapter explores the application of biosocial collaboration in a DOHaD intervention trial, namely Bukhali, the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) South Africa randomised controlled trial. Bukhali evaluates a complex intervention initiated prior to conception, through pregnancy, and into early childhood, with the primary aim of addressing childhood obesity. As part of the first trials assessing the potential of preconception interventions to shape intergenerational health, the trial is significant to DOHaD science. Bukhali has adopted a pragmatic approach, allowing for ongoing adaptation to new knowledge as it arises and testing not only the primary hypothesis but also undertaking process evaluation analyses. This requires a multidisciplinary process that serves as a case study of how biosocial collaboration can enhance DOHaD-inspired intervention research.

This chapter introduces approaches to materiality and biology within anthropological scholarship on sex and gender. It emphasizes how biological subfield of eco-evo-devo (which emerged in dialogue with feminist studies) can contribute to anthropological debates. The authors focus on hormones, signaling molecules that regulate many physiological processes in humans, animals, and plants. Hormones are a particularly productive site for considering how anthropologists interested in sex, gender, and bodies might benefit from additional attention to biological processes and biological knowledges, as they challenge prevailing concepts and categorical oppositions of self/world, nature/culture, and mind/matter. The authors first sketch out a history of the relationship between anthropology and biology and, within that history, how feminists have confronted biologism. They then introduce eco-evo-devo and explore how its insights about hormones and development can serve as a prompt to rethink the body within anthropology. Last, they review examples of social scientific engagement with hormones, arguing that a deeper engagement with the materiality of hormones rather than only with their popular representation can help anthropologists continue their ongoing efforts to reframe the social and apprehend gender and sexuality as entangled within complex ecologies of industrial capitalism.