This chapter explores how difference rooted in social locations can affect the lives and accounts of older people across the lifecourse and in late life. Older people's experiences of late life, seen from the perspective of varying social locations, serve to accentuate the lack of attention paid to diversity in social gerontology and studies of transition. Linking the narratives of older people from diverse social locations with the conceptual and theoretical debates on age and diversity provides a foundation from which to reconsider what is known about transitions in relation to late life. Reflecting specifically on diversity reveals the extent to which accounts from diverse social locations correspond to and conflict with the existing knowledge and expectations of transition and late life. Drawing on notions of the ‘other’ and ‘liminality’ articulated in post-colonial theory, for example, extends the challenges to understandings of transition raised in Chapter Seven, revealing how diverse social locations can contribute to experiences that exist within and between dominant and alternative models of late life transitions. The analysis put forward in this chapter renews the focus on ‘difference’ in relation to transition in ways that take account of the alternate frames of experience and negotiation.

The case illustrations of older people from diverse social locations that were presented in Chapter Six are the main focus of this chapter, supplemented by additional stories from older people in the Late Life Transitions project. The narratives of Elaine, Elizabeth and Colin, reveal similarities in how older people negotiate their experiences in a cultural context where they are defined as ‘other’, albeit from varying social locations. The illustrations in this chapter demonstrate how older people from diverse social locations can articulate their experiences through a lens informed by ‘difference’, emphasising the importance of considering diversity in relation to continuity and change in late life. The cases draw attention to the structural and culturally constructed aspects of the specific locations of experience. The accounts expose the tensions between personal and socio-cultural discourses on ageing, taken-for-granted assumptions, and the lived experiences of older people at diverse social locations. As such, they challenge normative and homogenous interpretations of age. They demonstrate how power, marginalisation and internalised notions may affect experiences and interpretations of ageing and late life. The lessons learned from Elaine, Elizabeth and Colin move the analysis towards a more complex consideration of diversity, transitions and the relations of age.