Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

Abstract

This article proposes ‘resonance’ as a fruitful way of conceptualising the relationship between youth and later life and reflecting on its significance: resonance is how a person’s ‘youth’ is lived with in the present of their later life. Resonance revisions youth, engaging with the complexity of its presence in the lifecourse. Relinquishing a preoccupation with continuity and linearity, youth seen from the vantage point of later life contributes fresh insights into what matters for people and how. This conceptualisation emerged from a qualitative study of women born 1939–52 which revealed that experiences attributed to the teens and early twenties have a presence in a person’s later life in ways unrecognised in established approaches, namely longitudinal life-course studies and socio-cultural approaches. These resonances are often historically inflected such that some cohorts may live with their youth in later life in ways that distinguish them from their predecessors and successors.

The (im)mobilities of COVID-19 in later life: burning and building generational bridges

“…Between August and October 2020, interviews were conducted with 45 women who had participated in the Girlhood and Later Life project. This project was a study of the transitions to adulthood of young women in Britain from 1954 to 1976, and the implications of youth transitions for their later-life experiences and identities in the 21st century (Xue et al, 2020(Xue et al, , 2021Tinkler et al, 2021aTinkler et al, , 2022. 3 Participants were sampled from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) using sequence analysis.…”