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The concept of relationality has recently found widespread favour in British sociology, particularly in the emergent sub-field of the sociology of personal life, which is characterized by its attachment to the concept. However, this 'relational turn' is under-theorized and pays little attention to the substantial history of relational thinking across the human sciences. This article argues that the notion of relationality in the sociology of personal life might be strengthened by an exploration of the conceptualization of the relational person and relational processes offered by three bodies of literature: the process-oriented thinking of American pragmatism, specifically of Mead and Emirbayer; the figurational sociology of Elias; and psychoanalysis, particularly the object relations tradition, contemporary relational psychoanalysis, and Ettinger's notion of transubjectivity. The article attends particularly to the processes involved in the individuality, agentic reflexivity and affective dimensions of the relational person.

Nature‐based Solutions (NbS) have rapidly been gaining traction across the research, policy and practice spheres, advocated as transformative actions to jointly address biodiversity loss and climate change. However, there are multiple, alternative ways to conceptualize NbS across those three spheres. To inform the NbS discourses in research, policy and practice, we critically reflect on the prevailing framing of NbS. Although the concept links environmental health to human well‐being, we argue that its current dominant framing reinforces a dichotomy between people and nature by highlighting one, external nature working for the benefit of society. For the NbS concept to support transformation, we believe it must embody a reframing of human–nature relationships towards regenerative relationships between humans and nature. To support the transformative aspirations of NbS, we propose a novel core framing of NbS making explicit the co‐dependence of people and nature, which underpins human well‐being and environmental health. We highlight how such a framing can support a transformation through influencing beliefs and normative values, and second, through the communication and application of the NbS concept in research, policy and practice. We then elaborate on how such a framing is key to support inclusivity and collaboration between diverse research perspectives, policy objectives across scales and implementation practices to deliver just and successful NbS. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of work on `thinking space relationally'. According to its advocates, relational thinking challenges human geography by insisting on an open-ended, mobile, networked, and actor-centred geographic becoming. The paper discusses the importance of this `relational turn' by positioning it within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space in geography. Following this, it highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure, and connect space. The paper then offers a moderate relationalism by discussing the notion of `phase space'. This acknowledges relationality but insists on the confined, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of geography. Some challenges for this approach are discussed.

Although a large body of work has explored the mechanisms underlying metaphor comprehension, less research has focused on spontaneous metaphor production. Previous research suggests that reasoning about analogies can induce a relational mindset, which causes a greater focus on underlying abstract similarities. We explored how inducing a relational mindset may increase the tendency to use metaphors to describe topics. Participants first solved a series of either cross-domain (i.e., far) analogies ( kitten:cat::spark-? ) to induce a high relational mindset or within-domain (i.e., near) analogies ( kitten:cat::puppy-? ) (control condition). Next, they received a series of topic descriptions containing either one feature (some jobs are confining) or three features (some jobs are confining, repetitive, and unpleasant), and were asked to provide a summary phrase of the topic. Use of metaphoric language increased when topics contained more features, and was particularly frequent in the high relational mindset condition. This finding suggests that the relational mindset induction may have shifted attention toward abstract comparisons, thereby facilitating the creative use of language involving metaphors.

Is it possible to induce a mind-set that will affect relational thinking in a subsequent reasoning task involving unrelated materials? We investigated whether evaluating the validity of verbal analogies (Experiment 1a) or generating solutions for them (Experiment 1b) could induce a relational mind-set that would transfer to an unrelated picture-mapping task. The verbal analogies were based on either near or far semantic relations. We found that generating (but not evaluating) solutions for semantically distant analogies increased the proportion of relational mappings on the transfer task, even after we controlled for fluid intelligence and response time. Solving near analogies did not produce transfer. Generation of solutions to far analogies appears to provide a potent method for triggering a mind-set that can enhance relational thinking in a different task.

Interdependent relationships among humans and nature often go overlooked, delaying better environmental, social and public health outcomes. Emerging approaches have emphasized thinking through relationships, which we call ‘relational thinking’. Threads of relational thinking have matured in areas such as anthropology and Indigenous scholarship, and interest is growing across many disciplines. Welcoming this new cadre of relational thinkers requires a more broadly accessible synthesis. Sustainability scholars have begun to overcome these barriers with high‐level overviews and broad calls to adopt relational thinking. This literature has investigated the conceptual underpinnings of relational thinking, but the concrete, empirical benefits of relational thinking for understanding human–natural systems remain obscure. Here, we introduce a wide range of accessible empirical examples to demonstrate the potential for relational thinking to illuminate diverse coupled human‐and‐natural systems. We complement these examples with an overview of the theory behind relational thinking. We use these empirical examples to argue that some conventional methods are consistent with relational thinking, particularly when accompanied by deliberation and flexibility about which relationships to target, why, and how. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.

The labels used to describe patterns and relations can influence children's relational reasoning. In this study, 62 preschoolers (Mage = 4.4 years) solved and described eight pattern abstraction problems (i.e., recreated the relation in a model pattern using novel materials). Some children were exposed to concrete labels (e.g., blue-red-blue-red) and others were exposed to abstract labels (e.g., A-B-A-B). Children exposed to abstract labels solved more problems correctly than children exposed to concrete labels. Children's correct adoption of the abstract language into their own descriptions was particularly beneficial. Thus, using concrete learning materials in combination with abstract representations can enhance their utility for children's performance. Furthermore, abstract language may play a key role in the development of relational thinking.

Territorial notions of place and region are being challenged by the relational viewpoint. Yet relational thinking often neglects to address questions of territory and territorial politics. This progress report examines some commonalities and differences between relational and territorial approaches to regions and regionalism. It considers the treatment of the state and territorial politics in the various literatures developing around the New Regionalism. The received distinction drawn between territorial and relational approaches could be rendered obsolete if critical attention were to be paid to matters of territory and territorial politics.

Here, we examine landscape as an actor of ecological restoration projects rather than as a resource. Based on relational thinking and the notion of agency, we aim to identify affordances recognized by local actors and to mobilize relational thinking to understand human-river relations. Although restoration projects have mainly been tackled from the point of view of contestation and landscape attachment, we question the capacity of these operations to produce multifunctional landscapes. We analyze the way in which the radical transformation of a landscape, resulting from the removal of two hydroelectric dams, led stakeholders to act. Our results not only reveal the limits of engineering approaches that struggle to overcome the nature–culture dualism, but also the value of integrating non-humans when we consider relationships rather than only objects. We analyze how the potential uses of a valley are revealed by the radical landscape transformations brought about by an ecological restoration project. We observe how the stakeholders project themselves into this new configuration, the resulting landscape visions it inspires in them, and how new functions emerge from the relationships woven between a new landscape and its stakeholders.