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.

The term ‘intergenerational trauma’ describes how trauma experienced in one generation can reverberate in the lives of descendants. The concept has been variously defined in relation to other disciplines and has overlaps with cognate concepts, including historical trauma, transgenerational trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this chapter, we provide a conceptual overview of intergenerational trauma in the interdisciplinary field of DOHaD research. Intergenerational trauma is of interest to many disciplines and frameworks in part because it lends itself to ’biosocial’ understandings of violence and discriminatory social contexts as physiologically embodied. Yet, intergenerational trauma also presents challenges for scientific study due to the difficulties inherent in stabilising it as a scientific object. Given the growing public interest in intergenerational trauma and its routinised clinical uptake for the care of marginalised communities, this chapter also considers a range of important questions related to policy translation, biopolitics, and social justice.