Cognitive co-ageing with inequitable political ecologies: Deconditioning & urban public transport

Later life cognitive trajectories are increasingly hypothesised as contingent on circumstances across the lifecourse. Looking backward, epidemiological research is revealing that contemporary trends in cognitive health are partially attributable to 20th century political, economic and social transformations. Looking forward, a corresponding prevention agenda is demarcating early and mid-life lifestyles as targets for optimising future cognitive ageing. Together, this work is expanding the temporalities and localities of later life cognition, revealing that our trajectories depend on complex contexts across several decades. At the same time, cognitive science and gerontology are concurrently, but separately, reframing cognition and ageing as dynamically emergent processes distributed across ecologies. Combining these developments, this paper reports findings from a creative ethnography conducted with older public transport users living with cognitive impairments. Using various multimedia and mapping methods, these passengers articulated ecological entanglements of cognition and ageing within major political and material transformations. Specifically, the paper focusses on the transformations wrought by covid-19, which impacted passengers in numerous ways and exemplified the potencies of ecological deconditioning in co-constituting cognitive ageing. At a personal level, isolation precipitated mental and physical deconditioning, while at an infrastructural level, similar processes left highstreets and services degraded. These overlapping deteriorations both traced and exacerbated regional inequalities of age and class. This work positions cognitive ageing as an everything problem, demanding multifaceted work toward cognition-optimising ecologies in the interests of social justice. Between epidemiology and self-help, creative ethnography provides a third “comprehensive connective” route for analysing cognitive ageing, blending population histories and personal futures.