From line to life course: Trajectory thinking and the temporal sociology of poverty

This article reconceptualises poverty as biography in motion , advancing a temporal-affective typology of trajectories – turbulent, stalled, and climbing – to show how structure, emotion, and agency interact over time. Drawing on life story and journalling research with 24 women in the UK, it develops a sociological grammar of motion that travels across welfare contexts. Where conventional poverty studies chart transitions or durations, the trajectory lens reveals how constraint and change acquire emotional form: turbulence as instability and fear, stalling as repetition and shame, climbing as fragile reorientation sustained through recognition and relational support. Synthesising Critical Realist and Feminist Standpoint perspectives, the paper positions emotion as causal mechanism rather than consequence, mediating between structural conditions and lived possibility. By foregrounding temporality, affect, and biography, it proposes a trajectory-sensitive sociology that bridges personal narratives and welfare regimes, shifting poverty research from the language of lines to that of lives in motion .