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Appel à contributions : La vie sociale des noms et les pratiques de
nomination dans les contextes migratoires
Calendar
Start of the call: February 1st, 2026
Deadline to send abstracts and closure of the call: March 1st, 2026
Selection and decision: March 10, 2026
Deadline to send articles: June 1st, 2026
Peer-review
Deadline to send articles in their latest version: November 1st, 2026
Publication: March 2027
Submission Modalities
Abstract proposals may be written in French, English or Spanish, and should include the author’s affiliation, a proposed title and an abstract (1,000 words or 7,000 characters including spaces). They should clearly present the method, the data and the empirical and theoretical contribution of the article to the theme of the topical collection. They may come from any social science discipline or law and should be sent to anne-sophie.bentz[at]u-paris.fr, mark.turin[at]ubc.ca and marie-antoinette.hily[at]orange.fr before March 1st, 2026.
Accepted papers can be written in French, English or Spanish.
For further details (standards, number of characters, presentation, etc.): https://journals.openedition.org/remi/5849
Selection Committee/Coordination
Anne-Sophie Bentz, Historian, Associate Professor, Université Paris Cité, Inalco, IRD, CESSMA, Paris, France.
Mark Turin, Anthropologist, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Marie-Antoinette Hily, Sociologist, Honorary Research Fellow, CNRS, Université de Poitiers, Migrinter, Poitiers, France.
Date
Deadline for the submission of abstracts 01/03/2026.
Contact
Argumentation
Names are neither natural nor neutral. Whether they refer to people, places or businesses, they are not labels: they are “a repository of accumulated meanings, practices, and beliefs, a powerful linguistic means of asserting identity (or defining someone else) and inhabiting a social world” (Rymes, 1999: 165). Through their referential function and multiple connotations, they index belonging and difference, tell stories, record histories of mobility and settlement, and mediate social interaction (Bramwell, 2016). Their agency may differ across domains, yet the fact that names “do” things remains unquestioned.
This topical collection examines names and naming in the context of migration, an underrepresented focus in sociolinguistic and anthropological work (Waldispühl, 2024). Migration is closely associated with multilingual repertoires and encounters between different social and legal systems. Naming offers an entry point for understanding the linguistic and social reconfigurations of migratory experience. The topical collection enriches migration research by bringing together humanities and social science perspectives on present and historical contexts grounded in empirical case studies. We do so through four themes:
Names as Technologies of Mobility
Names are not passive descriptors but instruments of movement, geographical and social. Even before a journey begins, prospective migrants may negotiate their names: whether to retain, adapt or abandon a birth name in anticipation of future encounters. Names are read as signals of ethnic origin, religion or class, with consequences for perceived “integration”, employability and exposure to discrimination (Gerhards, 2009; Tuppat and Gerhards, 2021; Dechief, 2011; Pennesi, 2016). Where states insist on legibility and standardisation, names become objects of bureaucratic simplification and control (Scott, 1998; Dechief, 2011; Waldispühl, 2024). In response, migrants sometimes seek partial anonymity or flexibility by using different names in different settings.
Adopting, discarding or recombining names can evade surveillance and administrative scrutiny, but also stage multiple selves when a single fixed legal name fails to represent lived personhood and experience (Dechief, 2009 and 2011). These choices are never cosmetic. In many societies, choosing a name implies aligning with a particular clan, caste or religion, while foregoing a surname, or even a nickname, carries its own implications. Migrants may alter their names to cross borders—material or symbolic—or to pursue social mobility and respectability in workplaces and universities. Naming thus emerges as an agentive strategy through which migrants challenge immobility, negotiate constraints and craft new life trajectories.
Contributions under this theme examine the use of names and alternative linguistic expressions at each stage of the migration journey, with particular attention to processes of name-giving, re-naming and de-naming, and to the connotations and associative meanings that names acquire, shed or reconfigure in migration contexts.
Toponyms as Archives of Memory and Claims to Territory
Toponyms speak of history and function as archives of collective memory, which may be accepted, rejected or reappropriated—sometimes simultaneously—by different communities. Critical toponymic scholarship has shown how place naming is implicated in struggles over identity, memory and authority, from colonial landscapes to postcolonial renaming campaigns (Beck, 2022; Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Rose-Redwood et al., 2010; Alderman, 2016; Williamson, 2023). When multiple names coexist for the same place, the choice of name becomes a symbolic, and sometimes political, act, reflecting contested visions of “who belongs” or, alternatively, “to whom the land belongs”.
Toponymic systems often interact and overlap in migration contexts. For migrants, naming a place can help build a sense of home in exile. It may concern a street, a building, a business or a religious site. Such toponyms act as linguistic markers, sometimes of ownership, always of belonging. By choosing names for places, migrants map mental and social geographies that recall home while also codifying attachment and presence in the new setting (Rasodi et al., 2025; Doll, 2024). We examine how naming practices function as place-making and how territorial claims are made by migrants through the choice of names. Ethnic and migrant entrepreneurship often leverages names to generate recognisability, assert heritage and render the city more habitable for newcomers (Verver et al., 2020; Hunt, 2011; Sinkovics et al., 2021).
Contributions to this theme may analyse how migrant place naming intersects with municipal naming policies, grassroots urban interventions and broader struggles over the symbolics of public space.
Reconfiguring the Self through Naming Systems
Naming is at once linguistic and deeply personal. Names sit at the intersection of intimate practice, social convention and the administrative state. Legal frameworks regulate what counts as a legitimate name, which scripts may be used and how names must be ordered or recorded, while people challenge and circumvent these constraints in everyday life (De Stefani, 2016; Dechief, 2011; Waldispühl, 2024).
Migration foregrounds tensions between naming systems. Name assessment requires nuanced cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding, yet registration procedures, digital forms and databases often presume a narrow, standardised model of personal naming, typically derived from Western European or North American norms (W3C 2020 “Personal names around the world”). This mismatch affects how migrants experience their names and, by extension, their sense of self.
The reformatting of names can be accompanied by shifts in identity, and may have consequences for kinship recognition, inheritance, traceability and citizenship status. The topical collection reflects on encounters between different naming systems and their possible coexistence. Contributions to this section explore how naming practices place and displace selves in migration at individual and community levels, and how people navigate, resist or repurpose institutional constraints.
The Ethics of Saying and Speaking
Getting a name right is a basic ethical gesture. Throughout the migration journey, migrants encounter their names as foreign names. Their pronunciation, spelling and script are questioned, approximated and sometimes radically altered. Migrants may adapt their names to facilitate pronunciation by officials, employers, teachers or neighbours. Written forms are equally fraught. Names are transliterated, transcribed or translated into new alphabets; diacritics are lost or substituted; states and institutions impose particular romanisation schemes or translation rules, as in the regulation of personal names in passports and identity documents (Dechief, 2009; Schlote, 2018). At times, these changes are embraced as pragmatic or even empowering; at others, they are experienced as painful compromises or as microaggressions that accumulate over time (Pennesi, 2016; Dechief, 2011; Zhang and Noels, 2021; Sok and Bonnett, 2022).
The ethics of naming thus encompasses decisions about translation, script support and standardisation, as well as the question of who has the authority to fix and pronounce the “official” version of a name. In all these processes, oral and written forms shift, revealing how translation into another linguistic and bureaucratic context produces approximation and, at times, erasure.
This theme invites contributions on changes to names. We ask how such approximations are tolerated, negotiated or resisted; how they affect everyday interactions and institutional encounters; and when they lead to subtle exclusion or overt discrimination in education, workplaces, housing, health care, legal proceedings and other domains of social life (Pennesi, 2016 and 2017; Zhang and Noels, 2021; Sok and Bonnett, 2022).
Overall, these four cross-cutting themes bring forth three transversal tensions, which will be addressed with equal consideration:
1/ Visibility vs. safety. Pseudonyms and nicknames can buy safety; and official visibility can bring recognition, access to rights and statistical presence but in the process overwrite existing names. How do communities manage these trade-offs, and under what conditions do individuals choose to appear, disappear or selectively disclose different names?
2/ Plurality vs. singularity. A plot of land can host many names; a person can carry several names that circulate in different languages and registers. Yet states and digital platforms typically prefer one-to-one mappings: one legal name per person, one “official” toponym per place. How can we acknowledge and encode plurality without producing administrative harm, technical exclusion or confusion, and without suppressing the everyday multiplicity of names in use?
3/ Repair vs. repetition. Renaming can repair historical injustice, but it can also reproduce hierarchies. This tension has been widely discussed in critical toponymy and decolonial renaming debates (Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Rose-Redwood et al., 2010; Wu and Young, 2023). How do we distinguish symbolic change from structural change? Under what circumstances do naming reforms redistribute power, and when do they simply rebrand existing inequalities?
Taken together, the contributions to this special issue highlight how names and naming in migration contexts illuminate broader questions of mobility and immobility, memory and territory, identification and misrecognition, and symbolic repair and its limits. The topical collection seeks to reset the narrative and shed light on this important, yet still underexplored area of study.
Bibliographie
Alderman Derek (2016) Place, Naming and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes, in Peter Howard and Brian Graham Eds., The Routledge Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, New York, Routledge, pp. 195-213.
Alderman Derek and Inwood Joshua F. J. (2013) Street Naming and the Politics of Belonging: Spatial Injustices in the Toponymic Commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr., Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (2), pp. 211-233.
Beck Lauren (2022) Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them, Montreal, Concordia University Press.
Berg Lawrence D. and Vuolteenaho Jani (Eds.) (2009) Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place Naming, London/New York, Routledge.
Bramwell Ellen S. (2016) Personal Names and Anthropology, in Carole Hough Ed., The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 263-278.
Bruck Gabriele (vom) and Bodenhorn Barbara (Eds.) (2006) The Anthropology of Names and Naming, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press.
De Stefani Elwys (2016) Names and Discourse, in Carole Hough Ed., The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 52-66.
Dechief Diane (2011) Naming Matters: Personal Names & Institutional Identification Practices during Settlement in Canada, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS/Actes du congrès annuel de l’ACSI.
Dechief Diane (2009) Forms and norms: Theorizing immigration-influenced name changes in Canada, Toronto, York University.
Doll Christian J. (2024) HOW THÖŊ PINY BECAME JUBA NA BARI: Naming and Place-Making in Urban South Sudan, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 48 (2), pp. 244-262.
Gerhards Jürgen and Hans Silke (2009) From Hasan to Herbert: Name-Giving Patterns of Immigrant Parents between Acculturation and Ethnic Maintenance, American Journal of Sociology, 114 (4), pp. 1102-1128.
Hunt Jennifer (2011) Which Immigrants Are Most Innovative and Entrepreneurial? Distinctions by Entry Visa, Journal of Labor Economics, 29 (3), pp. 417-457.
DOI : 10.2139/ssrn.1552679
Ishida Richard (2020) Personal Names Around the World, W3C Internationalization Working Group report, [online]. URL: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
Khosravi Shahram (2012) White Masks/Muslim Names: Immigrants and Name-Changing in Sweden, Race & Class, 53 (3), pp. 65-80.
Pennesi Karen (2019) Differential Responses to Constraints on Naming Agency among Indigenous Peoples and Immigrants in Canada, Language & Communication, 64, pp. 91-103.
DOI : 10.1016/j.langcom.2018.11.002
Pennesi Karen (2017) Universal Design for Belonging: Living and Working with Diverse Personal Names, Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity, 1 (1), pp. 25-44.
Pennesi Karen (2016) “They Can Learn to Say My Name”: Redistributing Responsibility for Integrating Immigrants to Canada, Anthropologica, 58 (1), pp. 46-59.
Pilcher Jane and Deakin-Smith Hannah (2025) “That’s Not My Name”: Identity Work by University Students with Minoritised Names, Equity in Education & Society, 4 (1), [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/27526461251329380
DOI : 10.1177/27526461251329380
Pina-Cabral João (de) (2010) The Truth of Personal Names, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16 (2), pp. 297-312.
Rasodi Relebogile, Naidoo Sherwyn, Canham Hugo Ka and Seedat Mohamed (2025) Place Naming as Black Place-making in Johannesburg’s Informal Settlements, Urban Forum, 36 (4), pp. 1-18, [online]. DOI: 10.1007/s12132-025-09543-8
Rose-Redwood Reuben (2021) The Social and Political Life of Names and Naming: Concluding Commentary, Nordic Journal of Socio-Onomastics, 1, pp. 187-198.
Rose-Redwood Reuben, Alderman Derek and Azaryahu Maoz (2010) Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-Name Studies, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (4), pp. 453-470.
Rymes Betsy (1999) Names, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9 (1-2), pp. 163-166.
Schlote Nadja (2018) “Too Hard to Pronounce”: Examining Immigration Ideologies in the Treatment of Newcomer Youths’ Names, Master’s thesis, The University of Western Ontario.
Scott James. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, Yale university Press.
DOI : 10.12987/9780300252989
Sinkovics Noemi and Reuber A. Rebecca (2021) Beyond Disciplinary Silos: A Systematic Analysis of the Migrant Entrepreneurship Literature, Journal of World Business, 56 (4), [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2021.101223
DOI : 10.1016/j.jwb.2021.101223
Sok Bonika and Bonnett Tina (2022) Enduring Effects: Name Mispronunciation and/or Change in Early School Experiences, Journal of Teaching and Learning, 16 (3), pp. 1-20.
Tuppat Julia and Gerhards Jürgen (2021) Immigrants’ First Names and Perceived Discrimination: A Contribution to Understanding the Integration Paradox, European Sociological Review, 37 (1), pp. 121-135.
Verver Michiel, Roessingh Carel and Passenier David (2020) Ethnic Boundary Dynamics in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: A Barthian Perspective, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 32 (9-10), pp. 757-782, [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2020.1757160
DOI : 10.1080/08985626.2020.1757160
Waldispühl Michelle (2024) Personal Names and Migration: An Overview, Nordic Journal of Socio-Onomastics, 4 (3), pp. 15-58.
DOI : 10.59589/noso.42024.17635
Williamson Beth (2023) Historical Geographies of Place Naming: Colonial Practices and Beyond, Geography Compass, 17 (5), [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12687
DOI : 10.1111/gec3.12687
Wu Chenhui and Craig Young (2023) Critical Toponymies beyond the Power-Resistance Nexus: Multiple Toponymies and Everyday Life in the (Re-)Naming of South China Sea Islands, Social & Cultural Geography, 24 (10), [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2104357
DOI : 10.1080/14649365.2022.2104357
Zhang Li and Noels Kimberly A. (2021) The Frequency and Importance of Accurate Heritage Name Pronunciation for Chinese International Students in Canada, Journal of International Students, 11 (3), pp. 608-627, [online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v11i3.2064
Zhang Ying Shan Doris and Noels Kimberly A. (2022) Call Me “Katy” Instead of “Yueyun”: English Names among Chinese International Students in Canada, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 45 (8), pp. 3379-3393.
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