Culture as Process: A Tribute to Jaan Valsiner

Jaan Valsiner has made numerous contributions to the development of psychology over the last 40 years. He is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator within both developmental psychology and cultural psychology, and has received numerous prizes for his work: the Alexander von Humboldt prize, the Hans Killian prize, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association. Having taught at Universities in Europe, Asia and north and south America, he is currently Niels Bohr professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. This book is the first to discuss in detail the different sides of Valsiner’s thought, including developmental science, semiotic mediation, cultural transmission, aesthetics, globalization of science, epistemology, methodology and the history of ideas. The book provides an overview, evaluation and extension of Valsiner’s key ideas for the construction of a dynamic cultural psychology, written by his former students and colleagues from around the world.

About the Author

BRADY WAGONER is Professor of Psychology and the Co-Director of the MA program in Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University (Denmark).  He completed his Ph.D. in psychology at University of Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship . His publications span a wide range of topics, including the cultural psychology, remembering, imagination, social change and the history of psychology. He is associate editor of Culture&Psychology, co-founding editor of Psychology&Society and on the editorial boards of several other journals . His recent books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s psychology in reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017) , Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press). The Psychology of Radical Social Change with Fathali Moghaddam and Jaan Valsiner (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Remembering as a Cultural Process with Ignacio Bresco and Sarah H. Awad (Springer, 2019). He has received several major awards, including the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (division 26) in 2017, the Sigmund Koch Award from the American Psychological Association in 2018, and the Lucienne Domergue Award from the Casa de Velazquez in 2019.  He has held senior research fellowships and honorary professorships in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

BO ALLESØE Christensen is Associate professor in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University (Denmark), and part of the board of directors of the Centre for Cultural Psychology. . His research interests and publications lies in the intersection of topics like computing, recognition, cultural psychology and philosophy. He has served as reviewer for and contributor to numerous journals, including Culture and Psychology , and Integrative Behavioral and Psychological Sciences .  His recent books include The Second Cognitive Revolution: A Tribute to Rom Harré (Springer, 2019) and Computational Thinking (Aalborg University Press, 2020)

CAROLIN DEMUTH is Associate Professor of Cultural and Developmental Psychology at Aalborg University (Denmark) where she also is Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Psycology and of the MA program in Cultural Psychology. She is visiting professor at Sigmund Freud University Berlin, co-founder and president of the Association for European Qualitative Researchers in Psychology (EQuiP), associate editor of Frontiers in Psychology: Cultural Psychology and serves on the editorial board of various other journals. Her research interest lies in the dialogical interplay of self, culture and discourse with a focus on narrative identity as well as language socialization andhuman development. Her publications also cover a wide range of topics in the field of qualitative methods and epistemologies. She held a research fellowship at Clark University (USA) in 2012 and taught internationally at universities such as Hebrew University (Israel), University of Tartu (Estonia), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Oslo (Norway), University of Melbourne (Australia) and University of Osnabrück (Germany). Her most recent book is the Cambridge Handbook of Identity (in press), edited together with Michael Bamberg and Meike Watzlawik.