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This chapter explores the critical intersections between ageing, human development, and the life course as precarious forms of life. The first part reviews the literature on global precarity and the endangerment of liveability in relation to ageing populations, with a focus on neoliberal strategies that naturalise and individualise risky life-course trajectories and health crises. The second part examines selected figures of the obese child, unstable adolescent, despairing mid-lifer, and cognitively impaired older adult as examples of crisis-laden personifications of social problems. Data are drawn from historical texts, popular images and professional knowledges. Conclusions revisit the work of Butler and Foucault to raise questions about current models of resilience and the possibilities of resistance and living differently.

Despite much emphasis on mental illness in later life, limited work has focused on mental health. This book aims to address this deficit by exploring, and explaining, mental health outcomes in later life through the lens of critical social gerontology and via the conduit of life course analysis. It adopts an approach underpinned by a commitment to understanding, and making visible, the role of lifecourse, and age related inequalities in creating or amplifying risks to mental health, as well as exploring those issues that afford protection. It aims to offer a critical review of existing discourse and disrupt the ‘taken for granted’ paradigm, including in the dementia arena. This approach not only recognises that mental health in later life is a complex multi-dimensional issue that cuts across time, cohort, social categories and individual experiences but that it is affected by a wide range of lifecourse and age related issues. It also encourages the development of understanding that adopts a wide lens of analysis and of policy and service related responses that reduce risks to mental health during the lifecourse and in later life itself. Further, it engages with the potential to learn from older people’s perspectives and lives.

The profile of older adults in the Global North is changing rapidly with increasing proportions of foreign-born ageing populations. Despite their demographic significance, very little research has been conducted on the complex and varied experiences of ageing, risk, and insecurity in this group, particularly with regard to significant life course events such as migration. Using the conceptual lens of precarity, this chapter presents a nuanced analysis of risk and vulnerability in the context of ageing and migration. We begin with a brief overview of the key economic, psychosocial, and cultural markers of precarity in older immigrants. Next, we highlight the ‘politics of precarity’ inherent in the larger political economy of immigration and the invisibility of racialized older immigrants in health and social care policies. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges to understanding precarity in the context of migration, and provide suggestions for future research.

This introduction begins with a review of bioarchaeological studies of children and childhood in the past in order to contextualize the advances that have been made in recent decades and also to outline theoretical shortcomings in these studies. This chapter then proceeds with an argument for further integration of biological and social streams of research in order to produce a more holistic bioarchaeology of children. Life course theory, interdisciplinary approaches, and an accounting of developmental plasticity are central to this vision. The chapter concludes with detailed summaries and contextualization of the remaining chapters in the volume.

Chapter 1 defends the need for new indicators of ‘gender awareness’ within skilled immigration policy. It draws upon research from feminist industrial relations, sociology, economics and intersectional feminist studies, to this end. The chapter focuses upon three key areas of the scholarship: Gender mainstreaming processes and institutions, life course differences between men and women and gendered definitions of ‘skill’, bringing in feminist critiques of human capital theory that predominates within skilled immigration debates.

This chapter presents the history and theoretical underpinnings of criminal trajectory research. The chapter distinguishes between a short historical view and long historical view of theoretical contributions. The key concepts, theories, and studies discussed are drawn from the criminal career notion, Moffitt's dual taxonomy model, important longitudinal investigations, developmental criminology, developmental psychopathology, and the life-course sociological and life-span psychological theoretical frameworks of Glen Elder and Paul Baltes, respectively.

Over the past two decades, there has been a rapid increase of research in the study of children and childhood in the past from anthropological, archaeological, and bioarchaeological perspectives. Despite recent research and theoretical developments, the advancement of research into childhood in the past continues to be somewhat hampered by the disparate theoretical approaches that are applied. This chapter reviews both the development of the bioarchaeological study of childhood and the important theoretical issues – including age, gender, and biocultural approaches – and offers suggestions for the development of approaches that “speak” between the different theoretical perspectives in the study of childhood in the past. Suggested future research directions include the integration of biological aspects into the social life course approach, by incorporating aspects of the biologically underpinned life history theoretical approach. Another imperative is to critically evaluate the attribution and meaning of “agency” in the bioarchaeology of childhood.

To examine the effectiveness of our argument that housework can be used to understand power in families, we apply our theoretical framework across the family life course. In this chapter we empirically examine patterns across the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload) regarding shifts in measures of power. We focus on changes in labor market participation, income, and occupational prestige from NSFH Wave 1 to Wave 2. We find that couples where women secured more economic resources at a pace similar to their husbands were more likely to be more egalitarian in their division of housework over time. However, couples where women secured resources while men did not were likely to exhibit gender deviance neutralization and a traditional division of labor at the second interview.

Prior reviews of the criminal trajectory literature mostly excluded findings on the relation of criminal trajectory groups to later life outcomes, turning points, and desistance. To set the stage for the review of this literature, the chapter first draws on the broader literature to define key terms, such as desistance and turning points, and to describe influential theories of desistance from crime and empirical findings. It is argued that criminal trajectory research needs to better integrate with these independent strands of research to advance the understanding of desisting offender trajectory groups. The chapter also details how emerging, innovative methodological approaches for the examination of turning point effects can help strengthen future criminal trajectory research on these issues. Next, the findings of criminal trajectory studies on later life outcomes and desistance are reviewed. Future research needs are identified to move the field forward. Last, the chapter seeks to make the case for a programmatic agenda that ties criminal trajectory research to developmental science models of intentional self-regulation across the life span, such as tripartite Selection, Optimization, and Compensation theory from Paul Baltes, to help explore the role of human agency in the development of crime.

Over the last 15 years, frailty has emerged as one of the most powerful constructs in gerontology, geriatrics, and health care delivery. Yet the dominant portrayal and response to frailty tends to mask that frailty is experienced by older people and is historically situated. This chapter suggests that the lens of precarity can be used to focus on the risks and insecurities experienced by older people and convey complex understandings of need in late life. It outlines key lines of thinking with regards to frailty and sketches emerging work on precarity with regards to aging. It then points to two angles to reconsider ‘frailty’ in late life: the politics of frailty, and vulnerability as a means to resituate the response to ‘frail’ subjects. It follows this by outlining the contributions that can be made through an analysis of precarity and concludes with suggestions for theoretical and methodological development.

This chapter describes the Healthy Ageing across the Life Course (HALCyon) NDA collaborative research project, the aim of which was to investigate biological and social factors from early life that influence healthy ageing in later life. Healthy ageing was studied as optimal functioning at the individual level, in terms of physical and cognitive capability and wellbeing. The roles of lifetime socioeconomic circumstances, cognitive development and education, body size and diet were investigated, as well as underlying biology (the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, telomeres and genes). The project undertook: systematic reviews and meta-analyses of all available studies; comparative analysis using harmomised data across nine British cohort studies; in depth analysis of single cohorts with unique data; and qualitative interviews with sub-samples of participants from three of these cohorts.

The fundamental proposition of the book is that there are two types of social risks, and voters of the Right are mainly exposed to one of them, namely the so-called life-course risks. These risks stem from biological life itself, above all else sickness and old age. The other type of risks relate to the labor market and is much more the poor man's burden. Life-course-related social programs will enjoy much more support among voters of the Right than social programs meeting labor market-related risks. This in turn implies that governments of the Right will be much more supportive of the former than the latter type of programs. The basic argument is complicated by the fact that governments of the Right need to employ complex reform strategies when pursuing their policy goals. These are called marketization via layering and erode and attack, respectively.