WHY A LIFE COURSE CENTER?

A life course approach is about time, age, biography, and history—the dynamics and inequalities of women’s and men’s pathways, perspectives, health, and well-being as they play out in work, family, educational, health, community, policy, and comparative locational contexts. Transformational demographic, technological, socioeconomic, and cultural changes are upending existing institutions undergirding the conventional life course, while simultaneously exacerbating multiple dimensions of disadvantage. Interdisciplinary life course scholars can address the human meaning of these dislocations and disadvantages, as well as necessary policy innovations to promote social engagement, social welfare, health and well-being.

GOALS

• Provide a learning community around life course scholarship and training
• Foster intergenerational educational experiences
• Understand lives, contexts, and social change through interdisciplinary longitudinal research