The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic’s effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic’s implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic’s social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic’s short- and long-term consequences unfold.

Is there a theoretical link between the gendering of life courses, worklife, and family participation? Is the "primary group" family to be considered part of the social structure? Is it passively exposed to its influences without any autonomy, is it rather an exclave from it, or is it an indispensable focus for understanding the social positioning of women and men? Most sociological analyses of social stratification, with their primary orientation on occupation, view the family-if they consider it at all-as hardly more than an alternative sampling unit, or at best as a rather secondary individual status variable ("marital status"). Conversely, family sociology pays more attention to social stratification, but here again, only few theoretical attempts focus the relationship between family and stratification. Life course research, if it is not practiced as an extension of the status attainment paradigm, has a bias similar to that of stratification research: the family is largely approached as a women's (problem) area, irrelevant to men's trajectories. In or-mille, participation professionnelle et genre. Il n'y a pas que les acteurs individuels qui pratiquent le "doing gender", les institutions font de même. I. Sociology: Looking at the "in-between" Most sociologists would agree that sociology is mainly about social relationships and their forms, and that such relationships exist not only between individuals, but also between social systems, sectors, groups, etc. Sociology's most general explanatory strategy could even be described as trying to find the reasons for the actors' social behavior not within them, but "around" them: in the social relations and institutional arrangements that frame their practical situations. However, this postulate encounters often decisive limitations, largely because of the social organization of sociology itself. Most sociologists are specialists of more or less traditionally defined areas: of the family, of international inequalities, of deviance, of the economy, of gender, of organizations, etc. Sociology can explain this state of affairs, but hardly justify it. 2 Typically, adult members of actual societies are members of a multitude of social fields, with different logics and structures. They have to cope with their multiple participations and with the conflicts and everyday problems they entail. How are we to understand the complexities of the actors' life-management if we con

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In spite of several decades of development, the theoretical underpinnings of life course research go rarely beyond the five general principles formulated by Elder. This article proposes a socio-structural framework based on a definition of the life course as an individual movement through social space. It integrates structural and cultural aspects, but gives priority to the former, and considers social space to be defined by three basic dimensions of differentiation: hierarchical ranks, specialisation, and system levels. In a second part, we discuss how Elder's principles relate to and can be used in the framework we propose. Since several disciplines are interested in this topic, our approach includes a series of docking points not only for other theoretical perspectives from sociology, but also from other disciplines such as social psychology or political science.

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