Well-Being, Health and Ageing: Social aspects of cognitive ageing – social institutions, inequalities and individual life courses
19/05/2026
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Ariane Bertogg, Assistant Professor / Research Group Leader, University of Konstanz
About this lecture:
Dementia-related conditions are a major public health concern and are associated with high social and economic costs for affected individuals, their immediate social ties and the society they live in. Despite recent medical advancements, a universal and accessible treatment is lacking, making prevention a central way to address these challenges. While ample research has identified modifiable genetic, biological and behavioural risk factors for dementia and accelerated cognitive decline, social factors have been less studied.
Relevant social factors refer to both risk factors and reserves accumulated across life courses (e.g., participation in employment, family roles) and the presence of close social ties in later life. At a macro-level, relevant social factors include social norms and institutional change such as the East-West German reunification, but also socio-environmental risks such as climate change. The presentation outlines a research programme that links these individual- and societal-level factors for cognitive ageing processes, and presents selected findings from my research programme.
About the lecturer:
Ariane Bertogg is an assistant professor at the University of Konstanz. After her PhD in Sociology, which she received in 2017 from the University of Zürich, she joined Konstanz as a Postdoctoral Researcher, where she was an active member at the Zukunftskolleg for four years. She has served as in interim professor at the LMU Munich and has worked and taught in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland. Since April 2025, she is a research group leader at the University of Konstanz. Her research group is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)’s Emmy Noether program, and her project, titled “Social Inequalities in Ageing Societies (SocIAS)”, studies inequalities in health and participation in later life.
The main objective of Ariane’s research is to disentangle individual- and context-level factors explaining gender and socio-economic inequalities in health, unpaid care work and paid employment across the life course, but with a special interest in later life. Taking a comparative perspective, her work investigates the cultural and institutional for new inequalities arising in ageing societies. Putting a special emphasis on societal crises (Covid, climate change, political transformation) helps her understand how social policies and welfare regimes can shape individuals’ life courses that lead to an accumulate of advantage and disadvantage. Her work has, among others, been published in Social Forces, Gender and Society, and Journals of Gerontology - Series B. She currently serves as a guest editor for Social Science and Medicine and authors a chapter in the forthcoming new issue of the Handbook of the Sociology of Aging.
Personal website: www.arianebertogg.com
Project website: www.inequality-aging.com
Contact
For further information, please contact Irene Carradori.
Join the webinar:
Please register here for the webinar.
You can attend the lecture either in person at the University of Konstanz or online:
- Zoom link: www.zukunftskolleg.de/jour-fixe (Meeting ID: 960 2080 6786, Passcode: 663613)
