9 2 Life Course Theory Introduction This chapter will explore the concept of life course, the terminology used, and some of the challenges to it. It will soon become apparent that there is no one ‘theory of the life course’ and that perhaps it is more accurate to talk of ‘theories of the life course’. Even better, it should be seen not so much as a theory but as an approach or framework which evokes a series of questions and perspectives.1 It is therefore not an approach which seeks to offer a meta-theory or makes an argument for a particular normative
Court decisions are typically seen as one-off interventions relating to an incident in a person’s life, but a legal decision can impact on the person as they were and the person they will become.
This book is the first to explore the interactions of the law with the life course in order to understand the complex life journey as a whole.
Jonathan Herring reveals how the law privileges ‘middle age’ to the detriment of the whole life story and explains why an understanding of the life course is important for lawyers.
Relevant to those working in family law, elder law, medical law and ethics, jurisprudence, gender and the law, it will promote new thinking by exploring the engagement of the law with the life course of the self.
Key messages The paper highlights the need for a comprehensive conceptualisation of time in life course research. It shows the value of incorporating notions of relative time in interaction with absolute time. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights, it proposes a tripartite definition of relative time as multidirectional, elastic and telescopic. It discusses the implications of this conceptualisation for the analysis of events and transitions. Introduction Life course research (LCR) is intrinsically temporal but this literature often draws on
Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan.
This book presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people’s family, education, employment and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities.
Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policymakers.
41 3 Precarious life, human development and the life course: critical intersections Stephen Katz Introduction In this chapter, I explore human development and the life course as precarious forms of life. The first part reviews the literature on precarity to draw out some of the critical and ethical issues related to ageing populations. The second part follows with an examination of how figures of the obese child, unstable adolescent, despairing mid-lifer and cognitively impaired older adult are examples of crisis- laden personifications of social problems
It is critical that the wellbeing of society is systematically tracked by indicators that not only give an accurate picture of human life today but also provide a window into the future for all of us.
This book presents impactful findings from international longitudinal studies that respond to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 commitment to “leave no-one behind”. Contributors explore a wide range and complexity of pressing global issues, with emphasis given to excluded and vulnerable populations and gender inequality.
Importantly, it sets out actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioners to help strengthen the global Sustainable Development Goals framework, accelerate their implementation and improve the construction of effective public policy.
This chapter lays the book’s conceptual foundations. After sketching three of the most influential disciplinary perspectives on residential behaviour, the chapter then reviews the specific conceptual approaches scholars have developed to understand how people move through housing systems as they pass through life. It contends that none of these approaches can fully describe or explain how housing is embedded into 21st-century lives. The chapter then moves on to outline a more modern life course framework which can provide new insights about contemporary
poor health ( Pinquart and Sörensen, 2007 ). This body of work has helped us move beyond monolithic but conflicting perspectives that family care is natural and should be assumed ( Al-Janabi et al , 2018 ), but that care needs will exceed the capacity of family carers ( Cherlin and Seltzer, 2014 ). Moen and DePasquale (2017: 50) argue the need for a critical examination of these tensions, calling for ‘scholarship capturing: caregiving trajectories and tradeoffs over the life course; variability in caregiving careers and compatibility of caregiving careers with
how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are. This focus on how housing is embedded into the dynamics of 21st-century life courses enriches research and debate in two ways. First, the book has shown that residential decisions and behaviours are deeply intertwined with events and processes across the other domains of people’s lives, as well as in the lives of their significant others. The way housing careers unfold also varies geographically with shifts in housing behaviour helping to drive changes in local populations and in
