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Progress in Human …
Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies2010 •
Names and Their Environment: Proceedings of the 25th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, Glasgow, 25-29 August 2014 (ed. by Carole Hough and Daria Izdebska)
Developing a Gramscian Approach to Toponymy2016 •
The naming of places is one of the primary ways in which the spatial imaginaries of colonialism have been entrenched within the spaces of everyday life in settler-colonial societies. Consequently, the reclaiming of Indigenous toponymies has become a key strategy for decolonizing space and place in the neocolonial present, thereby revalorizing place-based Indigenous ontologies and challenging the neocolonial state’s assertions of authority over geographical naming practices. This article examines the efforts of Indigenous peoples in WSÁNEĆ and Lekwungen Territories to reclaim their “storyscapes” through the renaming of PKOLS, a mountain known by the settler society as Mount Douglas in Saanich, British Columbia. In doing so, this study highlights how the reassertion of Indigenous ontologies of place challenges the white supremacist logic embedded in the commemorative landscapes of settler colonialism as part of the broader struggle for Indigenous self-determination. The article also draws attention to how institutions of higher education are themselves implicated in the legitimation of settler-colonial spatial imaginaries and calls upon scholars and activists to move beyond a politics of recognition, which reinforces the authority of the settlercolonial state, by decentering the heroics of settler political agency in the struggle for decolonization both on and off university campuses.
Environment and Planning C
Toponymic assemblages, resistance, and the politics of planning in Vancouver, Canada2018 •
The marginalized and impoverished Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood of Vancouver, Canada has long been subjected to planning programs that have aimed to solve area problems through strategic government intervention. The 2011-2014 Local Area Planning Process (LAPP), led by the City of Vancouver in consultation with local actors, represents the most recent of such programs. Despite the LAPP’s stated goal of inclusive participation, the resultant DTES plan transformed the political landscape of the neighbourhood and met with derision from stakeholders for its potential to generate dramatic capital-led transformations. In this paper, we critique participatory planning through a case study of the LAPP. We utilize a lens of critical toponymy (the investigation of the historical and political implications of place naming) as a methodological tool to examine planning technologies of power and their mobilization through governmental processes. We deploy a novel approach to toponymy, drawing on assemblage theory, that presents toponymy as a radically open and dynamic process mobilized relationally through a multiplicity of discourses and materialities. Our case study demonstrates that processes of toponymic assemblage within the DTES LAPP worked to 1) generate new territorial conflicts, 2) depoliticize community activism, and 3) co-opt racialized and class-based histories of displacement and dispossession to stimulate “revitalization” (“Japantown”). On the other hand, we found that in unanticipated ways, these processes worked to stimulate anti-gentrification activism, alliances, and resistance. Our analysis of planning highlights how toponymic agency can service oppressive and marginalizing place-framings, but it can also have liberating effects – by inspiring unlikely alliances and counter-framings.
Urban Geography
Assembling “Japantown”? A critical toponymy of urban dispossession in Vancouver, Canada2017 •
Geographic scholarship in critical toponymy has highlighted the importance of place naming as a form of discursive power within processes of urbanization. This paper builds on such literature and advances a novel theory of toponymic assemblage to interpret findings from a participatory research project in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. We foreground neighborhood history in the form of a Japanese Canadian enclave and its wartime uprooting and dispossession, and trace the historical antecedents of a resurrected toponymy of “Japantown” that has appropriated and renarrated Japanese Canadian history to facilitate further rounds of dispossession. Using a genealogical method, we highlight three “moments” of Japanese Canadian uprooting, return, presence, and activism, demonstrating how toponymies are assembled in place in heterogeneous and historically contiguous ways. This approach expands on current research in critical toponymy, offering a novel methodology for exploring the enrolment of toponymy, discourse, and materiality in the formation of place.
For many, toponyms, or place names, appear to provide objective descriptions of locations on the earth. But for geographers, names and naming practices are imbued with meaning, and a recent literature of critical toponymy has emerged that studies and recognizes place names as discursive agents of power and resistance that perform active roles in the ongoing production of place. However, the critical toponymy corpus had produced very little theoretically rich empirical research focusing how urban planning and policymaking processes mobilize place names, or how residents fight against such activities. This thesis fills that lacuna, first by generating a novel theoretical framework (toponymic assemblage) that describes the emergent, relational, and spatially grounded properties of place names. It then outlines a robust, extended, and mixed method case study approach that uses archival/newspaper documentation, discourse analysis, and interview data to form a historically based, theoretically driven, and structurally aware study of toponyms in relation to planning and policymaking. The thesis then presents two empirical case studies based in Vancouver, Canada’s impoverished Downtown Eastside (DTES) that are centred around the name “Japantown,” a toponym that recalls the neighbourhood’s long-time inhabitation by a community of Japanese Canadians who were forcibly uprooted from the Pacific coast during World War II. Specifically, this thesis situates contemporary neighbourhood conflicts within a historical context by constructing an interwoven analysis of toponymic assemblages in the DTES (including “Japantown”), noting how they emerged over time in relation to interventions such as planning, policymaking, the media, and activism while highlighting their fluid, malleable, and potential qualities. It then focuses on a recently enacted Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) in the DTES to illuminate how toponymic assemblages like “Japantown” were mobilized through planning to change understandings of place at the expense of current low income residents. The thesis concludes by considering the theoretical and positional limitations of the research, then suggests directions for future study and activism by highlighting how a more complete understanding of toponymic power and its limits can inform rights-based engagement among disparate groups.
Ideology and Politics Journal
Reconfiguring Identities within the Cityscape: Ideologies of Decommunization Renaming in Ukraine2020 •
Journal of Geography in Higher Education
The classroom as "toponymic workspace": towards a critical pedagogy of campus place renaming2020 •
cultural geographies
Renaming the past in post-Nazi Germany: insights into the politics of street naming in Mannheim and Potsdam2012 •
2012 •
Geographia Cassoviensis
Toponymic Politics and the Symbolic Landscapes of Minsk, Belarus2019 •
Social & Cultural Geography
Hebrew, Arabic, English: the politics of multilingual street signs in Israeli cities2012 •
Басик С.Н. Критическая топонимика как направление географических исследований: проблемы и перспективы // Географический вестник = Geographical bulletin. 2018. №1(44). С.56–63. doi 10.17072/2079-7877-2018-1-56-63
Критическая топонимика как направление географических исследований: проблемы и перспективы // Географический вестник = Geographical bulletin. 2018. №1(44). С.56–63. doi 10.17072/2079-7877-2018-1-56-632018 •
2018 •
Urban Geography
Data, dispossession, and Facebook: techno-imperialism and toponymy in gentrifying San Francisco2019 •
2017 •
American Review of Canadian Studies
Unsettling Settler Belonging: (Re)naming and Territory Making in the Pacific Northwest2015 •
2017 •
Journal of Historical Geography
(Re)naming the landscape: The formation of the Hebrew map of Israel 1949–19602001 •
Social & Cultural Geography
Proclaiming place: towards a geography of place name pronunciation2002 •