223 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Paper Session. Life Course Construction in Challenging Circumstances

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

While agency is a central principle of life course analysis, it is often studied without attention to contextual variation, social change, and subgroup differences. The exercise of agency---through positive visions of the future, goal setting, optimism and strategic action---is particularly challenging under conditions of war, environmental catastrophe, urban violence, racial/ethnic discrimination, escalating inequality and poverty, occupational restructuring and precarity, and social disorganization. What contributes to the capacity to manage one’s life course under changing, unpredictable, and difficult circumstances? How might institutional and organizational changes or policy shifts support the effective exercise of agency, helping people to manage their lives and to maintain their health and well-being in the turbulent contemporary social world?

Sub Unit

• Section on Aging and the Life Course / Life Course Construction in Challenging Circumstances

Session Organizer

• Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, Washington State University

Presider

• Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, Washington State University

Individual Presentations

• Youth Survival Perceptions: Forecasts for Future Health - Naomi Nichele Duke, University of Minnesota

• Lost in the Big World?: Adulthood Transition of Korean Transnational Migrants - Kirsten Younghee Song, West Virginia University

• Daughters of the Great Recession: School, Work, and Family Pathways in the Transition to Adulthood - Jessica Halliday Hardie, Hunter College, CUNY

• The Condensed Courtship Clock: How Elite Women Manage Self-development and Marriage Ideals - Katherine F Fallon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Casey Lorene Stockstill, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Janel E. Benson, Colgate University