People living with dementia are often presumed to have no agency or capacity to act in the social world. They are often excluded from participating in research while research methodologies may not capture their embodied engagement with people and places. Yet, like everyone, people with dementia can express their agency in nuanced ways, for example, through emotions or embodied expression. In the conceptual framework discussed here, nuanced agency is conceived as consisting of non-deliberative elements (embodied, emotional, habituated, reflexive and intersubjective) and deliberative elements (choices or decisions and facilitative). Although people with dementia have been found to benefit from gardens with their sensory appeal, how they experience gardens is not well understood. This critical interpretive synthesis aims to explore how people with dementia experience nuanced forms of agency and citizenship in gardens. A conceptual framework of agency was developed to address the aim and support the analysis. Analysis of the 15 included studies highlighted the value of the conceptual framework in identifying a wider and more granular array of nuanced agency expressed in embodied form and through dialogue. This included expressions of intersubjective and facilitative agency that informed opportunities for people with dementia to experience relational citizenship socially in communal garden settings. These findings suggest an opportunity for researchers to explore the embodied agency of people living with dementia more comprehensively by applying theoretical concepts of agency. Further testing of the framework’s utility for guiding collection and analysis of primary data involving people with dementia in garden settings is recommended.

Introduction: Dementia continues to be a global health concern owed to its increasing prevalence and coupled with physical and psychological burden. It is also the most feared diagnosis amongst older adults which may contribute to underdiagnosis. Pre-assessment counselling (PAC) may reduce fear and increase diagnoses when people with suspected cognitive impairment are empowered with choice and feel in control of their diagnosis journey.

Methods: This study recruited 10 clinicians from an NHS memory clinic in England, UK, and, using semi-structured interviews, sought to understand the mechanisms and effectiveness of PAC.

Results: Using reflective thematic analysis, 3 themes were found. 1. The person with dementia (PwD) is central in their diagnosis journey. 2. Candid conversations build strong therapeutic alliances. 3. Patients are more than their diagnoses.

Discussion: Clinicians emphasized the importance of timely diagnosis for the wellbeing of PwD, while also recognizing the need for patient-centred and collaborative approaches. Additionally, the study highlighted the significance of empowering PwD in decision-making processes, fostering resilience through comprehensive support, and addressing stigma through candid conversations to improve diagnostic outcomes and enhance patient engagement in dementia care. The study indicates that PAC is effective in enabling timely diagnoses, but there is a lack of dedicated appointments in NHS Trusts where PwD are empowered to manage their dementia journey and subsequent care.

A core normative assumption of welfare economics is that people ought to maximise utility and, as a corollary of that, they should be consistent in their choices. Behavioural economists have observed that people demonstrate systematic choice inconsistences, but rather than relaxing the normative assumption of utility maximisation they tend to attribute these behaviours to individual error. I argue in this article that this, in itself, is an error – an ‘error error’. In reality, a planner cannot hope to understand the multifarious desires that drive a person’s choices. Consequently, she is not able to discern which choice in an inconsistent set is erroneous. Moreover, those who are inconsistent may view neither of their choices as erroneous if the context reacts meaningfully with their valuation of outcomes. Others are similarly opposed to planners paternalistically intervening in the market mechanism to correct for behavioural inconsistencies, and advocate that the free market is the best means by which people can settle on mutually agreeable exchanges. However, I maintain that policymakers have a legitimate role in also enhancing people’s agentic capabilities. The most important way in which to achieve this is to invest in aspects of human capital and to create institutions that are broadly considered foundational to a person’s agency. However, there is also a role for so-called boosts to help to correct basic characterisation errors. I further contend that government regulations against self-interested acts of behavioural-informed manipulation by one party over another are legitimate, to protect the manipulated party from undesired inconsistency in their choices.

Cracks in the liberal international order (LIO) have been occurring since its very formation. Yet, some international relations scholarship frames the narrative about imminent threats to the LIO as if such threats were new. From a postcolonial vantage point, this essay contends that mainstream theorizing about international order is problematically Eurocentric and develops a three-pronged argument. In the first place, the essay argues for understanding order as a command or as an imposition. Order as a command renders visible power disparities, injustices, and inequalities of the international order as seen by actors from below. Second, the essay leans on Edward Said's contrapuntal reading method to show that experiences of order are plural rather than singular or universal. Third, the essay argues that from a postcolonial perspective, the opposite of order is not chaos or volatility but rather agency or the authorship to be a rule maker. A full picture of order as imposition requires understanding how togetherness and sameness are modes for Global South actors to find collective unity to resist the injustices and inequalities of the LIO.

The agency of a person with young onset dementia (YOD) changes owing to individual symptoms, uncertainty about the speed of progression and the severity of YOD. Dementia usually greatly interrupts life and reduces agency. Previous studies show that some people and families integrate and cope with dementia better than others. This study aimed to find out how YOD changes the agency of the person who has it and what family members’ role is in forming their agency. The data were collected in Finland in semi-structured interviews with 14 people with YOD and 15 family members, about a year after the diagnosis. These two data sets were analysed with a narrative method, actantial analysis. A wide variety of elements, both human and non-human factors, were found to promote and undermine agency. It was found that people with YOD need both integrity and flexibility to reconstruct their own agency. Resources support them in this process of reconstruction, and hinderers interrupt the process. This combination of integrity and flexibility, resources and hinderers, generates how people with YOD recount the future, the aims they set and how they reconstruct their agency. Other people, especially family members, are part of this dynamic process and when their relationship is cohesive, the agency of both parties increases. The participants used ideal and burdensome storylines to narrate factors that supported or interrupted their agency. Based on our findings, narrating one’s situation is, for coping, not only a means but its very basis.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of a phenomenon known as “lonely death” (kodokushi 孤独死): people who die alone and whose death goes unnoticed for a certain period of time. This has triggered public anxiety and moral panic because lonely death is often perceived as a form of “bad death” and a sign of the breakdown of family ties and neighborly relations. In the 2020s, this “feeling rule,” which associates lonely death with shame and fear, has quietly begun to be challenged by a group of post-mortem cleaning workers. By sharing their work experience and feelings through blogs, artworks, and books, the workers’ accounts of how they deal with the remnants of the deceased have turned the public perception of lonely death from an abstract, totalizing, fearful category into an understanding that such incidents have specific causes that can be faced and even prepared for. The cleaners’ emotional labor, especially their mourning for the dead, creates a sense of relatedness to the deceased, a feeling which is conveyed to the public through the cleaners’ narratives. The cleaners thereby change the feeling rules associated with the labor of dealing with the aftermath of a lonely death, turning it from “dirty work” into meaningful social action. This article contributes to an understanding of feeling rules by highlighting how individuals’ efforts, particularly, their reflections on their emotional labor, can change collective feeling rules.

In the African Studies literature “transformation” emerges as a capacious discursive field and project of state power. In this Keyword article, I move from postindependence questions of transformative social change to violence as a transformative project of the nation-state, examining its imbrication with questions of transition and state aftermaths. I analyze transformation as a promise of worldmaking around horizons of the “post”: postapartheid, postconflict, and postcolonial. I then consider textures of transformative urbanism in changing African cities, and analyze processes implicated in reclaiming forms of discard, positing transformation as recuperation. Transformation is ultimately a multidirectional conceptual field capable of remaking personal worlds and theoretical orientations.

This article serves as a commentary on Michael Hallsworth's 2023 piece, ‘A manifesto for applying behavioural science,’ featured in Nature Human Behaviour. The manifesto was prompted by methodological, practical and normative critiques directed at behavioural science and its role in public policy. In this commentary, I argue that the manifesto presents numerous insightful and constructive reform proposals regarding the scope, methods and values in behavioural science, which can help advance the field of behavioural public policy. While there is much to agree with, I contend in this commentary that applied behavioural science can and should delve deeper into the study of socially and culturally embedded processes of goal formation. Additionally, it should explore the institutional conditions necessary for individuals to formulate their goals competently and in a self-determined manner.

The Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) works with countries worldwide to implement testing in the areas of science, mathematics and reading through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years, and this process is recognised to influence education systems through areas such as curriculum. Over the past decade, the OECD increasingly has acknowledged the need to include a greater emphasis on environmental issues, including developing student competencies specifically in this area. For the 2025 PISA round, we were invited as environmental science education experts to contribute to the Science Framework, which underpins the science assessment. This paper explains how we responded to that invitation, including foregrounding the urgent need to understand the competencies of 15 year-olds to address critical socio-ecological challenges such as climate change. We argue that this provides environmental education practitioners and scholars with a powerful opportunity to gain world-scale data for research and advocacy, which could enhance the visibility and leverage for our field in curriculum, whilst also recognising the political process within which we were engaged.