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Brady
Wagoner

Psychology - Denmark

Contact details

Research topics

PROJECT

EXPERIENCING MODERN MEMORIALS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO PUBLIC GRIEF AND COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING

Death ruptures the social bonds that hold society together by tearing away its members and leaving others in a state of mourning. Various rituals must be performed and material artefacts constructed in order to re-integrate the dead and bereaved into the social order. Thus, it is not surprising that people have been constructing memorials and rituals in response to loss in cultures around the world since pre-historic times. However, over the last century—in response to the two World Wars, Holocaust and Vietnam war—a new modern form of memorial has emerged. In contrast to traditional memorials that focus on heroes and victories through a figurative form that convey a clear meaning, modern memorials have increasingly highlighted victims and blunt individual loss through an artistically minimalist form. A major turning point in this development was Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial completed in 1982. More recent examples include the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe’ in Berlin and the ‘9/11 national memorial’ at ground zero in NYC. These sites explicitly aim to promote memory, critical dialogue and human rights. But this raises the question of how people actually interpret and position themselves within these experientially open spaces and what wider impact do they have on their thinking? Though the lens of social psychology and memory studies, this project aims to explore people’s flow of experience as they encounter modern memorial sites, using a ‘walk-along’ interview methodology that incorporates the latest technology for recording first-person video and audio (i.e., small, wearable camera glasses). Participants are asked to comment on their feelings, thoughts and memories as they are triggered by different features of the site, which is followed by a post-visit interview. Special attention is given in the analysis to sensory aspects, figurative language use and argumentation, in order to outline a psychological approach to modern memorials.

Activities / Resume

BIOGRAPHY

Brady Wagoner is Professor of Psychology and Director of the MA and PhD programs in Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University (Denmark). He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. His publications span a wide range of topics, including cultural psychology, memory, imagination, social change, metaphor, qualitative methods, the history of psychology, and more generally the constructive dimensions of the mind. He is associate editor of the journals Culture & Psychology and Peace & Conflict. His most recent books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Street Art of Resistance with Sarah H. Awad (Palgrave, 2017), Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Psychology of Radical Social Change with Fathali M. Moghaddam and Jaan Valsiner (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He was awarded the ‘early career award’ from the American Psychological Association (division 26). In his free time, he enjoys the absurd pursuit of mountain summits.

MAIN PUBLICATIONS

Books

  • 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., Bresco, I., Awad, S.H. (Eds.). (2017). The Psychology of Imagination: History, Theory and New Research Horizons. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishers.
  • Awad, S.H., & Wagoner, B. (Eds.) (2017). Street Art of Resistance. London: Palgrave.
  • Wagoner, B. & Brescó, I. (Eds.)(2016). Conflict and memory [special issue]. Peace & Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology, 22 (1), 1-98.
  • Moscovici, S., Jovchelovitch, S., & Wagoner, B. (Eds.) (2013). Development as a Social Process: Contributions of Gerard Duveen. London: Routledge.
  • Wagoner, B. (Ed.)(2013). Symbol Formation: Fifty years later. Culture & Psychology, 19(4), 433-569.
  • Wagoner, B. (Ed.) (2010). Symbolic Transformation: The Mind in Movement through Culture and Society. London: Routledge.

Articles

  • Wagoner, B. (2017). What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments. Culture & Psychology, 23(2), 186-207.
  • Wagoner, B. (2015). Collective Remembering as a process of social representation. In G. Sammut, E. Andreouli, G. Gaskell, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Social Representations (pp. 143-162). 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.
  • Wagoner, B. (2013). Symbol Formation reconsidered: Moving forward by looking back. Culture & Psychology, 19(4), 433-440.
  • Wagoner, B. (2013). Bartlett’s concept of schema in reconstruction. Theory & Psychology, 23(5), 553-575.
  • Wagoner, B. (2009). The experimental methodology of constructive microgenesis. In: J. Valsiner, P. Molenaar, N. Chaudhary, and M. Lyra (Eds.). Handbook of Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences (pp. 99-121). New York: Springer.
  • Wagoner, B. & Valsiner, J. (2005). Rating tasks in psychology: From a static ontology to a dialogical synthesis of meaning. In: A. Gülerçe, I. Steauble, A. Hofmeister, G. Saunders and J. Kaye (Eds). Contemporary Theorizing in Psychology: Global Perspectives (pp 197-213). Toronto: Captus Press.