Nomination for Humboldt Research Award (Prof. Wagoner & Prof. Stodulka)

Thomas Stodulka has successfully nominated Brady Wagoner for the prestigious Humboldt Research Award in recognition of outstanding lifetime achievements in research and teaching. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation selects internationally renowned scientists and scholars from all disciplines for the award, “whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline; recipients are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.” Prof. Wagoner has been especially recognized for his contributions to cultural psychology, memory studies, the history of psychology and the development of dynamic process methodologies.  

Award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their own choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany, and to join the Humboldt network of leading researchers from around the world. The award comes with a grant of 60,000 euros to conduct research, and with excellent opportunities for further sponsorship.

Professor Wagoner is a cultural psychologist at Aalborg University (Denmark) and Oslo New University College (Norway). He has published 17 books and over 100 articles and book chapters in just the last decade. These works span a wide range of topics that are mainly centered on exploring the relationships between culture, mind and memory as unfolding processes, and developing novel methods to study them as such. His most important books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2018), Remembering as Cultural Process with Ignacio Bresco and S.H. Awad (Springer, 2019) and Culture as Process: A tribute to Jaan Valsiner with B. Christensen and C. Demuth (Springer, 2021). He has previously won a number of significant academic awards, including the Sigmund Koch Award (2018) and Early Career Award (2017), both from the American Psychological Association.

Prof. Wagoner is hosted by Thomas Stodulka, Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, with a special focus on Psychological Anthropology, at Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on the interplay between affect, emotion, childhood and adolescence, alternative economies and education, mental health and illness, stigmatization, datafication, critical epistemologies and affective methodologies. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related children, young men and women in Yogyakarta, Indonesia between 2001 and 2015, and he has directed international research projects on the role of affect and emotion in fieldwork and ethnography, envy in transcultural perspectives, and critical perspectives on interdisciplinary emotion research and big data. He has published 6 books and over 50 articles and visual ethnographies on these topics. He co-directs the methodology lab at the CRC 1171 ‘Affective Societies’ at FU Berlin and he is research fellow at the Leipzig Lab working group on ‘Children and Nature’. He is the co-founder of the Psychological Anthropology Section, German Anthropological Association (DGSKA), and the co-founder and convenor of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology (ENPA) at the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA). Thomas is Associate Editor of Ethos and Brill Book Series Editor of Social Sciences in Asia. He has won multiple research awards, and he is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Alumni and Alumni of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).

Prof. Wagoner will collaborate with Prof. Dr. Thomas Stodulka, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, to develop novel synergies between cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, particularly in connection with emotions and methodology. Together with Prof. Dr. Meike Watzlawik at Sigmund Freud Universität Berlin, they will also analyze data on people’s collective symbolic coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccination decision-making, compliance with restrictions, trust in authorities, information seeking and conspiracy theories.