פרס מקס גלקמן 2026

This dissertation examines the lived experience of fearing possible memory loss in contemporary Israel, focusing on what I term "pre-diagnosed dementia"—the intersectional domain between personal experiences of fear or suspicion toward a future with dementia and the social spheres within which these experiences unfold. Through ethnographic fieldwork with individuals contemplating cognitive decline, family members, medical professionals, and policy stakeholders, I explore how the specter of dementia casts a shadow over aging experiences, creating distinctive forms of subjectivity and regimes of living that exist in the temporal space of the "not-yet."
Theoretical Framework and Conceptual Contributions
Central to this work is the metaphor of the "shadow"—a conceptual framework that illuminates how potential futures with dementia infiltrate present experiences. Drawing on Ferguson's understanding of shadows as resemblance and Ahmed's work on anticipatory fear, I develop the concept of "shadowy affects" to describe how social imaginaries of dementia hover at the edges of consciousness during ordinary moments of forgetfulness. The shadow operates at three interconnected levels: as proximity (the nearness of threatening possibilities), as resemblance (connecting present experiences to feared futures), and as knowledge of the "not-yet" (emerging possibilities existing in liminal states before formal articulation).
This research contributes four primary insights to the critical social study of dementia. First, I demonstrate that pre-diagnosed dementia constitutes a "regime of living" where meanings are constructed, social negotiations take place, and possibilities for future living with dementia are formed. Second, I argue that these liminal spaces of possibility matter for understanding life course transformations, revealing everyday processes of becoming and unbecoming that are often hidden from analytical sight. Third, I examine how subjectivity forms through interactions with institutional contexts and temporal pressures, showing how the anticipation of dementia creates distinctive forms of "dementia-zed" subjectivity characterized by vigilance and coherence work. Finally, I trace how the shadow metaphor extends beyond individual experience to illuminate state policy discourse, revealing how dementia simultaneously appears and disappears within Israeli aging policy as both demographic concern and policy absence.
Institutional Shadows: Policy and Discourse
The first section analyzes how dementia operates as a shadow within Israeli aging policy, generating what I term "economies of forgetting." Chapter 2, "The Age of Meaning," examines how contemporary policy discourse positions dementia as the negative shadow of successful aging, representing ultimate failure to achieve meaning and fulfill potential. Under neoliberal governance, the state redirects investment from care provision toward individual responsibility for meaning-making and prevention, creating trajectories where dementia becomes synonymous with loss of citizenship value. Through analysis of the "Index Map for Optimal Aging" and interviews with policymakers, I show how meaning transforms from abstract concept into measurable policy metric, establishing archetypal figures like "Sara" (the average optimal ager) and the "savant ager" who embody aspirational aging while casting shadows that exclude those unable to perform meaning according to prescribed metrics.
Chapter 3, "Aging: Routine or Emergency?" analyzes how demographic discourse creates "emergencized" aging, generating urgency around "years in health" while systematically abandoning those who cannot conform to optimization ideals. This shift from counting the number of aging individuals to measuring the quality of years represents fundamental changes in policy regimes, creating ethical obligations for individuals to "enlist" in preventing dysfunctional old age. The state demonstrates its own form of institutional forgetting by prioritizing prevention over care infrastructure, effectively "making-forget" about dementia care while maintaining the appearance of concern through initiatives like the failed National Strategic Plan for Dementia.
Subjective Shadows: Affect and Temporality
The second section explores how shadows operate within individual subjectivity as both affective and temporal states. Chapter 4, "Suspicious Minds," investigates the lived experience of fearing memory loss through the emotional states of fear and suspicion. I examine how individuals navigate the uncertain space between "normal aging" and dementia onset, asking, "What is really happening to me?" These affective responses emerge in everyday moments of forgetfulness where the possibility of dementia becomes a hovering presence. Through ethnographic cases of women like Edith (who writes poetry about her "limitations"), Ari (experiencing "trouble" with navigation), and Tamara (describing cognitive changes as "fluttering"), I demonstrate how shadowy affects create heightened vigilance toward ordinary experiences of forgetting.
Chapter 5, "Minding Their Own Future," examines how anticipated futures intrude upon present experience through what I term "stakeholding"—asserting claims over what has not yet arrived. This represents "futurework" conducted by interlocutors to establish stakes in their futures against restrictive social scripts. Through cases of women like Edna (choosing which "wars" to fight in potential cognitive decline) and Leah (concerned about maintaining "eye-level" interactions with her children), I show how individuals create conceptual space for alternative futures while negotiating family scripts and institutional expectations. This temporal work functions as care for possible futures while resisting intrusive voices about declining capacity.
Intersubjective Shadows: Knowledge and Diagnosis
The final section examines how shadows operate in spaces between individual experience and institutional knowledge. Chapter 6, "Signifying Others," explores how "significant others" become "signifying others" during moments of forgetfulness, creating regimes of gazes that coalesce around memory lapses. Through analysis of interactions where everyday mistakes become subject to diagnostic interpretation by family members, friends, and medical professionals, I demonstrate how dementia functions as a signifier that thickens situations into events requiring response. These vernacular diagnostic moments reveal how the proximity of dementia's possibility generates fear through the anticipated accumulation of suspicious incidents.
Chapter 7, "Beginnings and Turning Points," investigates how diagnostic moments accumulate into trajectories pointing toward dementia. Examining narratives from family members and medical professionals, I analyze how "first signs" and "turning points" become intensified performances of significance that foreclose alternative possibilities. These moments transform from mundane forgetfulness into "emergencized" disruptions demanding immediate response, creating what I term "narrative foreclosure," where families and individuals become trapped within catastrophic scripts of inevitable decline.
Methodological Approach
This research employed multi-sited ethnography across online narratives, policy analysis, interviews with stakeholders, memory clinic observations, and an ongoing writing group with seven women in their 70s and 80s who shared fears about memory loss. This "patchwork ethnography" enabled me to trace how meanings about dementia migrate across social worlds, from intimate moments of forgetting to institutional responses and policy formations. The writing group became particularly significant as a space where participants could scale down the "elephant in the room" of dementia into something more manageable and negotiable.
Implications and Contributions
This dissertation contributes to anthropological understanding of how fear operates as a social and temporal phenomenon, demonstrating how anticipated futures shape present subjectivities and institutional responses. It reveals how the "pre" constitutes a meaningful realm of life deserving analytical attention, challenging medical anthropology's focus on post-diagnostic experiences. The concept of "shadowy affects" offers new theoretical tools for examining anticipatory states across various contexts of potential loss or transformation.
For dementia studies, this work expands understanding beyond clinical and care settings to examine how fear of cognitive decline shapes broader social experiences of aging. It demonstrates how policy discourse creates shadows that influence individual experiences while revealing how state mechanisms of "making-forget" operate through selective attention and resource allocation.
The research ultimately argues that living in the shadow of future memory loss constitutes a distinctive form of contemporary subjectivity requiring ethnographic attention. Rather than viewing pre-diagnostic states as merely preliminary to "real" dementia, this work positions them as meaningful sites where social anxieties, temporal orientations, and possibilities for aging are negotiated and contested. Understanding these shadow spaces proves essential for developing more nuanced approaches to aging, memory, and care that acknowledge the full spectrum of cognitive experiences rather than only those deemed worthy of intervention or support.