ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the young women's migration journeys and experiences within the UK asylum system influenced their narratives of age-based social positioning and life course transitions, describing some of the consequences these had for their experiences of home-making. It explores the young women's 'cartographies of age' examining the mapping out of productions and experiences of age-based social positions and life course transitions across different spatial, temporal and social terrains. Five forms of life course time were explored; interruptions; 'early' transitions; continuity; asymmetrical age and foreshortened horizons. Life course pathways unfolded across social, spatial and temporal terrains over which age identities and experiences were produced and marked. Exploring social interactions, social imaginaries and discourses, researchers working in new social studies of childhood approach have critiqued developmental narratives of childhood and youth that revolve around chronological and biological age alone, drawing attention instead to socially constructed nature of these life stages.
