WORKSHOP
Systematising participatory toponymic diagnostics during street addressing and settlement mapping operations
WORKSHOP
Ethical principles of doing toponymic research with Deaf communities
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025
Delving Deeper into Iona's Toponymy
Following the successful launch of the online resource, the Iona’s Namescape team hosted interactive workshops on April 3, 2025, at the Iona Village Hall. These sessions aimed to engage participants in a hands-on exploration of the island's place-names, uncovering the layers of history and culture embedded within them.
Workshop Highlights:
Interactive Learning: Participants engaged in activities that delved into personal names, stories, and songs associated with Iona's place-names, fostering a deeper appreciation of the island's cultural heritage.
Guess the Meaning: Attendees tested their knowledge and intuition by guessing the meanings of various place-names, sparking lively discussions and shared discoveries.
Session Details:
Morning Session: 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Evening Session: 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Community Reflections:
The workshops provided a platform for both locals and visitors to connect over shared histories and narratives. Many participants expressed a renewed sense of pride and curiosity about the island's toponymic heritage, emphasizing the importance of preserving these stories for future generations.
These events underscore the vital role of community engagement in preserving and celebrating the rich tapestry of Iona's place-names, ensuring that the island's legacy continues to inspire and educate.
Announcement Type Call for Papers
Location of workshop: Nordost-Institut, Lüneburg, 16–18 April 2024
Convenors: Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu), Anke Hilbrenner (University of Düsseldorf), Anton Kotenko (University of Düsseldorf), Joachim Tauber (Nordost-Institut)
Keynote speaker: Maoz Azaryahu (Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Haifa, Israel), author of Von Wilhelmplatz zu Thälmannplatz: politische Symbole im öffentlichen Leben der DDR (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), and An Everlasting Name: Cultural Remembrance and Traditions of Onymic Commemoration (München: De Gruyter, 2021); co-editor of Narrating Space, Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016) and The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
Abstract: The naming and renaming of urbanscapes has never been a disinterested and easy matter; this process has always been part of structures and discourses of power and identity politics (Azaryahu 2009). As historians of the Habsburg Empire have recently shown, the reconfiguration of city space has also been linked to issues of regime change, nationalisation, memory, and commemorative practices (Palonen 2015; Rusu 2019; Berecz 2020, 2022; Reill 2020, 199). In the context of the Romanov Empire, however, the history of toponyms has not yet been viewed as part of its political history and historians of the empire have not paid much attention to it. Thus, with the exception of renaming streets in the Northwestern region of the empire after the Polish uprising of 1863–1864 (Staliūnas 2007), the history of urban toponymy of the empire was previously tackled only by regional historians, who did not pay much attention to the political context of this process, the rationale behind these decisions, their practical implementation, or how the population at large reacted to name changes (see for instance, Vladimirovich 2009; Päll 2009; Gorbachevich and Khablo 2006). During this workshop we would like to focus on the history of names of cities and towns as well as street names in the Romanov Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. The participants will examine the palimpsest of toponymical practices involving not only different political, economic, and cultural spaces but also different languages. On the one hand, we would like to explore the process of the gradual politicisation of toponymic practices in late imperial Russia, its achievements, and failures. On the other hand, the history of toponymy of Romanov imperial cities merits attention as a way to study the extent of the empire’s penetration of everyday life of its inhabitants. The workshop aims to explore these issues from a broad geographical perspective, and especially welcomes contributions dealing with the Baltic provinces, western borderlands, Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia from the middle of the nineteenth century to the breakup of the empire.
Contributors are encouraged to address, but are not limited to, the following questions:
Outcome: Special issue of a peer reviewed journal specialising in urban history.
Funding: Subject to financing being secured, the organisers plan to cover accommodation for all participants and travel expenses within Europe according to the rules of the Bundesreisekostengesetz. Participants will also be asked to use green travel options, where available. Online participation is available for participants from outside Europe.
Deadline: Please submit an abstract of 200 words together with a CV by 1 October 2023. We will inform participants by 1 November.
Please submit a proposal and address any inquiries to Anton Kotenko at anton.kotenko@hhu.de.
Anton Kotenko, University of Düsseldorf
Logainmneacha i gcríocha dátheangacha
Place names in bilingual areas
Ceardlann Logainmneacha/Place names Workshop
12-13 May 2022
Gaois, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU, is organising a workshop on the topic of place names in bilingual areas. It will focus on two aspects of the theme, research and administration. Discussion will not be limited to Irish place names. The workshop will be in Irish (12 May) and in English (13 May). The workshop will be held on the All Hallows Campus.
If you are interested in giving a paper at the workshop, please send a title and 200-word abstract to una.bhreathnach@dcu.ie by 3 March 2022. Informal enquiries are also welcome.
In many regions of the world, geographical names are the subject of heated debate. Often, they embody local or national identities; some names even express political or territorial claims. At the same time, gazetteers are a useful tool in everyday life and in research. However, existing gazetteers demonstrate great variation in content and metadata structure. These variations prove a severe hindrance to research that aims to compare data from different databases.
In 2019, researchers from the Herder Institute, the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig and the Justus Liebig University Giessen will start work on a project exploring the content and metadata structure of existing gazetteers. The project is financed by the Leibniz Association. The project team will bring together historians, geographers and computer scientists. At the first workshop of our project, we will address the following questions: