Brady Darrah
Wagoner

PROJECT

Memorials as Liminal Spaces: A social cultural psychology of sacred urban places

Death ruptures the social bonds that hold society together by tearing away its members. Various rituals must be performed and material artefacts constructed to re-integrate the dead and bereaved into the social order—in the liminal period of mourning both are betwixt and between. One particularly potent artefact are memorials. Memorials bring to the fore the social psychological dynamics of objectifying and transmitting collective memories, which are then used to anchor new social issues. The narratives that memorials tell provide a way of dealing with the past vis-à-vis present and future challenges, building solidarity with some and anger toward others. Against the background of communal loss, multiculturalism and globalization the question arises, how do people interpret and position themselves within modern memorials and what wider impact do they have on people’s thinking?

While much has been written about the controversies over the form and production of these memorials, there has been surprisingly little on how people actually experience and use them—in other words, a social psychological perspective. This project uses an innovative new method of subjective cameras to access and analyze people's stream of experience as they explore and make meaning of different kinds of memorial sites.

BIOGRAPHY

Brady Wagoner is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Psychology and MA programs in Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University (Denmark).
He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. His research broadly focus on how people construct meaning in their lives within cultural frameworks to act in the world, with publications spanning a wide range of topics including: cultural psychology, memory, social change, metaphor, psychological development, qualitative methods, the history of psychology, and the public understanding of science. He is associate editor of the journal Culture & Psychology and on a new of other editorial boards.
He has received several major professional awards, including the ‘early career award’ in 2017 and ‘Sigmund Koch Award’ in 2018, both from the American Psychological Association (division 26), and ‘Lucienne Domergue Award’ in 2019 from the Casa de Velazquez. In his free time, he enjoys the absurd pursuit of mountain summits.
 

MAIN PUBLICATIONS

• Wagoner, B., Brescó, I., Zadeh, S. (Eds.) (2020). Memory in the Wild. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishers.
• Wagoner, B. (2020). Culture and Memory. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Oxford: OUP
• Wagoner, B., Brescó, I., & Awad, S.H. (2019). Remembering as a Cultural Process. New York: Springer.
• Wagoner, B. (Ed.) (2018). Handbook of Culture and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wagoner, B., Moghaddam, F. & Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (2018). The Psychology of Radical Social Change: From Rage to Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Wagoner, B. (2017). The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wagoner, B. & Gillespie, A. (2014). Sociocultural mediators of remembering: An extension of Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction. British Journal of Social Psychology, 53, 622-639.
• Moscovici, S., Jovchelovitch, S., & Wagoner, B. (Eds.) (2013). Development as a Social Process: Contributions of Gerard Duveen. London: Routledge.