Research framework: The research examines the misalignment of family paths with institutional frameworks and the temporal desynchronization of life trajectories. The new imaginaries at work in family choices are analyzed by exploring the tensions between institutional and individual logics.

Objectives: The aim of this issue “Life Trajectories and the Temporalities of Family Life: New Imaginaries, New Injunctions” is to understand and analyze family changes through the prism of the life trajectories concept, in the light of two major changes at the dawn of the last 50 years: the denormalization and deinstitutionalization of life trajectories.

Methodology: The article is underpinned by a brief review of the literature on the concept of pathways, set against some of the latest family changes. Approaches are drawn from different disciplinary fields: sociology, anthropology and social work are essentially qualitative (interviews, focus groups, observations, etc.). The issue is based on the research expertise of the contributing authors.

Results: This article highlights the evolution of “family making”, the family imaginaries that underpin them and the political norms that frame them.

Conclusions: It appears that the new support structures proposed by the State to secure people’s life paths are failing to normalize the increasing number of deregulated family transitions and the desynchronization of lives. This issue shows how individuals manage both to comply with these imperatives and to turn them on their head, demonstrating innovative ways of “making family”.

Contribution: The contribution of this issue is in line with a field of research that questions the life trajectory on the scientific and social scene. This issue documents the modalities of making family at a time when life paths empowerment of institutional frameworks is simultaneously accompanied by attempts at state supervision of family trajectories. It provides information on the diverse and fragmented temporalities of the modalities of “making family”. The different articles show how family trajectories are structured around imagined and unprecedented constructions of the family, which appear as individual demands to maintain control over their life journey.

• life trajectories
• family imaginaries
• temporality
• transitions
• denormalization
• detraditionalization
• deinstitutionalization

https://journals.openedition.org/efg/21954