TY - JOUR AU - Kohli, Martin PY - 2010/04/26 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - "The Life Course: Structures and Institutions" JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/the-life-course-structures-and-institutions SP - AB - Course Description This graduate-level seminar is designed as the core introductory course for the Sociology of the Life Course area. The course introduces you to theories, methods, and substantive topics which exemplify the life course paradigm. The sociology of the life course is a perspective that brings together strands from sociological foci on socialization, social structure and social policy, and sociology of age. It is concerned with how social factors, including historical events, combine with individual resources and vulnerabilities at any given time to shape the trajectories of individual lives and to influence subsequent generations. Taking seriously both social selection and social causation, studies that take a life course perspective aim to understand both continuity and change across time and across generations. The seminar will focus on four themes: (1) human lives as embedded in and shaped by institutional and historical context, (2) linked lives, (3) human agency and structural constraints, and (4) work-life transitions and trajectories. This course will blend both lecture and class discussion. The first half hour of class will pro-vide an introductory lecture and overview of the week’s topic. The second hour will be dedi-cated to in-depth discussion of the week’s readings, as well as discussion of questions that you introduce – thus you will take major responsibility for presenting and discussing the weekly readings. Each week’s discussion will be based on assigned readings, so it is essential that these readings be completed before each class session. The collection of articles – assigned as required readings – will be provided as a reader (pho-tocopied packet). ER -