Handbook of Life Course Transitions

The Handbook of Life Course Transitions examines transitions not as private milestones but as socially constituted processes with profound consequences for individuals and societies. Bringing together leading scholars from diverse contexts, it explores how transitions are structured, governed, and made meaningful within broader social and historical contexts. The volume treats transitions as key sites through which social norms, power relations, and inequalities are reproduced, negotiated, and contested.Drawing on insights from education, work, family, housing, and migration studies, contributors develop a reflexive and interdisciplinary approach to understanding transitions. Combining quantitative longitudinal and comparative analyses with ethnographic, biographical, and situational methods, chapters examine how transitions are experienced, revisited, and re-experienced across the life course. The volume also highlights global variation in how transitions are organized and examines how research itself participates in shaping the transitions it seeks to understand.Providing a transdisciplinary overview of the field, the Handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of sociology, social policy, life course studies, demography, education, and social psychology. Its conceptual insights will also be valuable to researchers and practitioners in education, labor, social welfare, and aging.