Synthesize agency under stress across resilience and design

concepts/design-grammar.md

@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ This wording is a proposed synthesis, not an approved project slogan. Coherence
 | Keep authority scoped and contestable | Who may act for whom, on what basis, and who else bears the effects? | [Agency and Automation](agency-and-automation.md) and [Idea Trail 9](../IDEA_TRAILS.md#trail-9--intelligence-automation-and-legitimate-authority) |
 | Prefer interoperable paths where they preserve autonomy | Can people change implementations, exchange information, and leave without losing the underlying capability? What coordination costs arise? | [Legible Systems](legible-systems.md#design-principles) |
 | Preserve essential capabilities through failure | What survives a broken component, missing network, lost maintainer, or deliberate refusal of the preferred path? | [Resilience and Graceful Degradation](../systems/resilience-and-graceful-degradation.md) |
+| Preserve usable agency under reduced capacity | When stress, fear, exhaustion, injury, overload, or uncertainty narrow capacity, can the system reduce demands while preserving orientation, refusal, help, alternatives, and recovery? | [Agency under stress](../research/agency-under-stress.md) and [Resilience and Graceful Degradation](../systems/resilience-and-graceful-degradation.md) |
 | Make important behavior legible | Can affected people understand an action, its authority, limits, and avenues for challenge without first becoming specialists? | [Legible Systems](legible-systems.md) |
 | Preserve provenance without indiscriminate retention | Can a claim, change, decision, or generated contribution be traced to its basis while respecting privacy and forgetting? | [Thought Routing](../THOUGHT_ROUTING.md) and [Idea Trail 11](../IDEA_TRAILS.md#trail-11--memory-provenance-and-continuity) |
 | Make consent contextual | Which use, audience, duration, data, and consequence were actually authorized? How are withdrawal and other affected parties handled? | [Agency and Automation](agency-and-automation.md#delegation-and-affected-parties) |
@@ -71,4 +72,4 @@ See [Idea Trails](../IDEA_TRAILS.md) for broader routes. These examples are **pr
 
 Use [Thought Routing](../THOUGHT_ROUTING.md) to capture the source once, compare existing treatments, and choose a canonical home. A useful path may be **capture → investigate → synthesize → make a project-specific decision → test or observe → revise**. It is not a required promotion ladder: an idea can stay a question, split, be contested, or be retired. Research can challenge a principle; a principle does not certify a research finding.
 
-**Source note:** This synthesis was prompted by the 2026-09-24 discussion of recurring project patterns, agency/automation, and the later dynamic-coherence/adaptive-continuity discussion. A 2026-09-28 synthesis/connection discussion sharpened the treatment of relationships as first-class objects and synthesis as distinct from replacement expertise. A 2026-09-29 Existential Euphoria / Root Sequence comparison added the provisional Membrane Test: a boundary-and-interface prompt for relationship without erasure. The conversation text was available during drafting, but no durable conversation URL was supplied. The table and wording are AI-assisted proposals for author review.
+**Source note:** This synthesis was prompted by the 2026-09-24 discussion of recurring project patterns, agency/automation, and the later dynamic-coherence/adaptive-continuity discussion. A 2026-09-28 synthesis/connection discussion sharpened the treatment of relationships as first-class objects and synthesis as distinct from replacement expertise. A 2026-09-29 Existential Euphoria / Root Sequence comparison added the provisional Membrane Test: a boundary-and-interface prompt for relationship without erasure. A 2026-10-05 agency-under-stress synthesis added the question of whether systems preserve usable agency when human capacity is temporarily reduced. The conversation text was available during drafting, but no durable conversation URL was supplied. The table and wording are AI-assisted proposals for author review.

research/README.md

@@ -76,6 +76,7 @@ This directory holds bounded research inquiries and versioned papers that synthe
 
 ## Cross-cutting related work
 
+- [Agency under stress](agency-under-stress.md) — **AI-assisted working synthesis; author review pending; not clinical guidance or an interrogation manual**. Connects controllability, coercion, decentering, psychosocial support, recovery, and human-facing system design while preserving evidence limits.
 - [Adaptive continuity / dynamic coherence — intellectual lineage and prior art](dynamic-coherence-lineage.md) — **targeted related-work note; not a novelty finding or systematic review**. Traces state/parameter change, ultrastability, requisite variety, double-loop learning, resilience engineering, sustained adaptability, adaptive management/governance, path dependence, and second-order cybernetics; also records prior uses of the phrase “dynamic coherence.”
 - [Reading Trails](reading-trails/README.md) — **curated brain-food maps**, separate from claim-level bibliographies: archives, societies, courses, old magazines, reading lists, practitioner hubs, and other places worth wandering. The first trail covers [systems, cybernetics, complexity, and adaptive systems](reading-trails/systems-cybernetics-complexity.md).
 
@@ -91,7 +92,6 @@ These links point to existing public draft PRs, not merged research or reviewed
 
 - [The Stoned Age, PR #45](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/45): source register, claims ledger, appraisal notes, and linked paper/booklet/essay/talk. Scholarly appraisal and author review remain incomplete.
 - [Intelligence without omniscience, PR #44](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/44): developing research on distributed knowledge, recognition, trust, and enabling conditions.
-- [Agency under stress, PR #42](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/42): cross-domain synthesis with explicit evidence and domain limits.
 
 ## Publication boundary