ONOMA
Names, Places, and Identities: The Nominal Order and Toponymic Regime of Post-Socialist Romania
Cod proiect: LBUS-HPI-ERG-2020-05
Perioada de desfășurare: 4 ianuarie 2021–31 decembrie 2022
Finanțator: ULBS, prin finanțare externă nerambursabilă acordată de Hasso Plattner Institute și Hasso Plattner Foundation.
Echipa de cercetare: Mihai Stelian Rusu - director de proiect, Adela Popa - cercetător, Anca Bejenaru - cercetător, Ionela Vlase - cercetător, Alin Croitoru - cercetător, Fawzia G. Rehejeh - specialist relații publice.
Project description
ABSTRACT
Beyond the fact that they are useful devices for locating things in space, place-names constitute toponymic means of politicizing space. Based on this theoretical premise, this project sets out to examine the “toponymic regime” of Romanian society, as part and parcel of the nominal order that is institutionalized within post-socialist Romania. To this purpose, the projects aims to gather two complementary sets of quantitative data: (1) first, from official sources, the project will construct a quasi-exhaustive and multidimensional dataset of toponyms, comprising the names of localities, streets, stations, schools, hospitals, theaters, museums, libraries, churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and NGO-s, among other; (2) second, by conducting a sociological survey based on a nationally representative sample, the project will collect data on peoples’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the place-names they interact in everyday settings and daily lives. The data thus gathered will be examined through multi-variate statistical analyses that will enable identifying how the toponymic regime currently existing in contemporary Romania is structured in terms of a series of socio-demographic variables such as the gender, profession and occupational status, socio-economic status, geographical origins and historical period in which the person after whom the objective is named has lived.
OBJECTIVES
Objective 1: To understand the structure of Romania's contemporary toponymy.
Objective 1.1.: Constructing a comprehensive dataset of Romania's toponymy, including town names, street names, school names, stadium names etc.
Objective 1.2.: Coding the toponymic dataset in terms of various variables.
Objective 2: To chart the attitudes and beliefs of ordinary citizens regarding the country's current toponymy.
Objective 2.1.: Collecting opinion data through a nation-wide web-survey in order to explore people's attitudes towards the existing toponymy in Romania.
Objective 2.2.: Analyzing the social attitudes towards the existing toponymy in Romania in terms of respondents' socio-demographic variables (region of residence, gender, age, education, occupation, etc.) but also according to the social, cultural, and political values embraced by respondents.
RESULTS
Conference participations
Rusu, M. S. & Croitoru, A. (2021). The 15th Conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA) “Sociological Knowledges for Alternative Futures” (online conference), University of Barcelona, Spain, 31 August–3 September 2021, with the paper “Transforming Namescapes: Street Renaming during Romania’s Postsocialist Period.”
Books
To be updated.
Book chapters
To be updated.
Articles
Rusu, M. S. (2021). Sequencing Toponymic Change: A Quantitative Longitudinal Analysis of Street Renaming in Sibiu, Romania. PLoS ONE, 16(5): e0251558. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251558.
Rusu, M. S. (2021). The Toponymy of Sporting Venues: A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis of Football Stadium Names. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, DOI: 10.1177/10126902211011382.
Croitoru, A. & Vlase, I. (2021). Stepwise Migration: What Drives the Relocation of Migrants upon Return? Population, Space and Place, DOI: 10.1002/psp.2492.
Vlase, I. & Grasso, M. T. (2021). Support for Prostitution Legalization in Romania: Individual, Household, and Socio-cultural Determinants. The Journal of Sex Research, DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2021.1968334.
Vlase, I. & Preoteasa, A. M. (2021). Flexi(nse)curity in Adult Webcamming: Romanian Women's Experiences Selling Digital Sex Services under Platform Capitalism. Gender, Place & Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1878114.
Rehejeh, F. G. (2021). To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: Content Analyzing the Mass Media Discourse of the Refugee Crisis in Romania. Saeculum, 51(1), pp. 66–76, DOI: 10.2478/saec-2021-0007.
Rehejeh, F. G. (2020). To Come or Not to Come: A Content Analysis of the Refugee Crisis in the Romanian Mass Media. Saeculum, 50(2), pp. 159–173, DOI: 10.2478/saec-2020-0027.
Reports
To be updated.