Conferences

Revised Call for Nominations for the 2018 Name of the Year

The American Name Society requests nominations for the Names of the Year for 2018. The names selected will be ones that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States. It is not necessary, however, for a nominated name to have originated in the US. Any name can be nominated as long as it has been prominent in North American cultural discourse during the past year. For example, the Overall Names of the Year for 2017 and 2016 were Rohingya and Aleppo. Charlie Hebdo, the title of the French satirical magazine, won Trade Name of the Year in 2015.

Nominations are called for in the five following categories:

  • Personal Names: Names or nicknames of individual real people, animals, or hurricanes.
  • Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical location, including all natural features, political subdivisions, streets, and buildings. Names of national or ethnic groups based on place names would be included here.
  • Trade Names: Names of real commercial products, as well as names of both for-profit and non-profit incorporated companies and organizations, including businesses and universities.
  • Artistic & Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium, as well as titles of art works, books, plays, television programs, or movies. Such names are deliberately given by the creator of the work.
  • Miscellaneous Names: Any name which does fit in the above four categories, such as names created by linguistic errors, names of particular inanimate objects other than hurricanes, names of unorganized political movements, names of languages, etc. In general, to be considered a name, such items would be capitalized in everyday English orthography.

Winners will be chosen in each category, and then a final vote will determine the overall Name of the Year for 2018. Anyone may nominate a name. All members of the American Name Society attending the annual meeting will select the winner from among the nominees at the annual ANS meeting in New York City, New York on January 4, 2019. The winner will be announced that evening at a joint celebration with the American Dialect Society. Advance nominations must be received before January 2, 2019. Nominations will also be accepted from the floor at the annual meeting. Please send your nominations, along with a brief rationale, by e-mail to either Dr. Cleveland K. Evans: <cevans@bellevue.edu> or Deborah Walker:<debwalk@gmail.com>

The revised Call for Nominations can be downloaded here.

Call for Papers: Sustainable Geography – Geographies of Sustainability, Trondheim, Norway, June 16-19 2019

The 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting will be held in Trondheim, Norway, June 16–19 2019 and includes a panel called “Tightening the noose – the impact of constricted migration policy on sexual and gender minorities”.

As neoliberal and populist policies are enforced in countries in the EU, borders are becoming increasingly difficult to cross and welfare regimes are weakened. The options for individuals to migrate to the EU are diminished and existing migrants are left with lesser resources in host societies. Contemporary cultural politics of immigration is also increasingly organized around cultural unfitness of migrants in the host
society. Simultaneously, Western democracies have gradually marketed tolerance of sexual diversity as a distinct and inherent characteristic of their culture, distinguishing them from the homophobic rest. This while establishing a sexual humanitarian apparatus that turns out to shape, in a restrictive way, the asylum system. In this call for session presentations, we ask for scrutiny of how these shifts are affecting sexual and gender minorities, who appear as paradoxical figures in these politics.

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to thomas.wimark@humangeo.su.se,  florent.chossiere@upem.fr, and deniz.akin@ntnu.no before the 10th of December. Authors will be notified about the status of their submission as soon as possible thereafter.

A PDF of this call for papers can be downloaded here.

Call for Nominations for the 2018 Name of the Year

The American Name Society requests nominations for the “Names of the Year for 2018”. The names selected will be ones that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.

Nominations are called for in the five following categories:

  • Personal Names: Names or nicknames of individual real people, animals, or hurricanes.
  • Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical location, including all natural features, political subdivisions, streets, and buildings. Names of national or ethnic groups would be included here.
  • Trade Names: Names of real commercial products, as well as names of both for-profit and non-profit incorporated companies and organizations, including businesses and universities.
  • Artistic & Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium, as well as titles of art works, books, plays, television programs, or movies. Such names are deliberately given by the creator of the work.
  • Miscellaneous Names: Any name which does fit in the above four categories, such as names created by linguistic errors, names of particular inanimate objects other than hurricanes, names of unorganized political movements, names of languages, etc. In general, to be considered a name such items would be capitalized in everyday English orthography.

Winners will be chosen in each category, and then a final vote will determine the overall Name of the Year for 2018. Anyone may nominate a name. All members of the American Name Society attending the annual meeting will select the winner from among the nominees at the annual ANS meeting in New York City, New York on January 4, 2019. The winner will be announced that evening at a joint celebration with the American Dialect Society.

Advance nominations must be received before January 2, 2019. Nominations will also be accepted from the floor at the annual meeting. Please send your nominations, along with a brief rationale, by e-mail toDr. Cleveland K. Evans: cevans@bellevue.edu or by email to Deborah Walker: debwalk@gmail.com

The Call for Nominations can be downloaded here.

Call for Papers: Beyond the Canon (of Children’s Literature), University of Zadar, Croatia, May 8-10 2019

The Croatian Association of Researchers in Children’s Literature and the University of Zadar cordially invite researchers to submit a proposal for the 14th International Child and the Book Conference (CBC2019): Beyond the Canon (of Children’s Literature), Zadar, Croatia, 8 – 10 May 2019.  For more information, please visit the Conference webpage http://cbc2019.hidk.hr/.

They invite proposals for papers to be presented in English or Croatian. The presented papers will be 15 minutes maximum, followed by 5 min discussion time. For a paper proposal, please submit an abstract of 200-500 words and up to 5 keywords. The submission deadline is 15 November 2018. All proposals will be reviewed, and the authors of the proposals will receive notification of acceptance by 15 January 2019. To submit paper proposals or panel proposals, please fill in the interactive submission form at this link.

Registration opens for the 2019 ANS Conference, New York City, NY, January 3-6, 2019

American Name SocietyRegistration is now open for the 2019 ANS Conference in New York City, NY. The ANS conference will take place in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of American (LSA) Conference from January 3-6, 2019.

To register, you must join the ANS or renew your ANS membership.

LSA Registration is now open! Go to the LSA Meeting page to register. You must be a member of the LSA (as well as the ANS) in order to attend.

You can also reserve your room at the Sheraton in New York City via the LSA. Use the LSA link to receive a special discounted room rate.

Note that to renew your ANS membership, you will be redirected to the Taylor & Francis website where you will need to enter information from your renewal notice.

Once your membership is up to date, you can register online here, or download a PDF of the Conference Registration Form and mail it to ANS Treasurer Saundra Wright, as per the instructions on the form.

For more information about the ANS Conference and the LSA Conference, including rate and hotel information, please visit our Conference Page.

Should you trademark a greeting?

Bula Kafe in Florida Photo: Facebook / Bula Kafe

According to this article at Radio New Zealand, Pacific leaders meeting in New Zealand are outraged by the commonly-used Fijian greeting, “bula” being trademarked by a US businessman who runs and owns three businesses spread across Florida – Bula Kafe, Bula on the Beach and Bula Coco Beach. Many people have left negative reviews of the businesses on Facebook. The “bula” logo has appeared on many of products and advertising, from signage and bottle branding, to “bula babe shorts”. It is not the first time US businesses have been accused of cultural appropriation. For example, Illinois restaurant chain “Aloha Poke Company” has recently copped criticism for sending cease and desist letters to other restaurants using the word “aloha”. The New Zealand Minister for Pacific Peoples said: “This is a disturbing revelation and will be distressful not only to Fijians in New Zealand but to all Fijians throughout the world. It is unbelievable that a company from another country can trademark what belongs to another group of people.”

Names in the Economy VI: Values, Branding and Globalization , Uppsala, Sweden, 3–5 June 2019

Together with the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University, the Institute for Language and Folklore will host the Sixth International conference on Names in the Economy in Uppsala, Sweden, on 3–5 June 2019. This conference will focus on the economy or the economic aspects that are hidden or evident in various types of names; how names can hold different values and how names can be used or mis-used to create values, how names are used in branding and how names can be means in a global world. More details in Swedish about this event can be found here: www.sprakochfolkminnen.se/NITE6.