School of Social and Political Science

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Sociologist Professor Nick Prior has received a nomination for the 2026 Kyoto Prize, Japan’s most prestigious private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences.  

Nick is nominated in the Arts and Philosophy section, in the Music sub-category, for his “masterfully crafted body of work” and its contribution to his academic field.  

The Kyoto Prize is widely considered to be Japan’s version of the Nobel Prize. It honours individuals for achievements in science, art and philosophy that exemplify the philosophy of its founder, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Kazuo Inamori: “A human being has no higher calling than to strive for the greater good of humanity and the world.”  

Nick is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include popular music, contemporary media and the relationship between digital technology and popular music production. Japanese popular culture and music is one of his areas of speciality, and he worked previously at the University of Tokyo of the Arts. As well as his academic role, Nick is an electronic musician and leans on this experience in his academic work.   

Some of the work that led to the nomination includes:  

• Conceptual and empirical work on the human voice as a connected, distributed and hyper-mediated entity
• Research on Hatsune Miku, the ‘world’s first crowd-sourced celebrity’
• As a musician, composing pieces using audio samples taken from a series of sound walks through Tokyo, as well from the internal circuits of Japanese vending machines
• A range of articles that have explored how digital technologies are sunk into (rather than ‘shape’) everyday cultural practices 

 The award nomination said: “In terms of research contribution and quality, Prof Prior’s publications amount to a masterfully crafted body of work, reflecting broad knowledge of sociology, science and technology studies, popular music studies, philosophy and qualitative methodologies”. The nomination continues: “above all…he has set a new research agenda for theorising material objects and music technologies (e.g. instruments, music software, iPhones), the processes and practices that revolve around these objects and technologies, and the know-how that enables their use in everyday urban life and under late capitalist labour conditions.”  

Since its beginning in 1985, each year the Kyoto Prize has chosen one Laureate for each of its three categories: Advanced Technology; Basic Sciences; and Arts and Philosophy. Some of the most influential academics and artists of modern times have been honoured.  

Nick said: “Research can be a long, lonely and looping process. To have my work recognised in this way is both touching and surprising. I’m grateful for the nomination, but especially grateful that peers have indulged my academic curiosities over the years with good grace.”  

Nick – who works at the University’s School of Social and Political Science - and his fellow nominees will learn the results in June 2026. 

Go to Nick’s web profile to learn more about his work. 

This video of a performance by Nick at Edinburgh’s experimental electronic music night Wavetable gives a sense of how his work combines sound work and scholarship.