Practical information
This event is open to all, but registration is required. Tea and coffee will be served.
The event is held at Domus Juridica, Room 8113. If you do not have an access card, please reach out to hannagbe@uio.no when outside.
About the seminar
In this seminar, Waldispühl explores how migrants' personal names become a point of negotiation between identity, legal and administrative systems. Adopting a mainly sociolinguistic perspective, she examines how societal factors and individual choices about personal names interact in cross-cultural settings.
The empirical focus is on contemporary Western Europe, complemented by selected historical examples. Key themes include the pragmatic adjustments migrants make to ease communication and to fit host-country naming rules-such as simplifying spellings, adapting pronunciation, or restructuring names-and the use of parallel names in different social contexts.
Waldispühl also addresses the role of social bias and discrimination in pushing some migrants toward name change, while others resist and treat heritage names as non-negotiable identity markers. In conclusion, she will invite discussion of implications for legal and administrative practice.
Building on recent work that highlights the sociocultural significance of personal names for identity and integration, she argues that name laws, registry design, and registration routines should recognise names not as minor technicalities but as central to belonging in multilingual, multicultural societies.
About the speaker
Michelle Waldispühl is a professor of German linguistics at the University of Oslo specialising in personal name research, historical linguistics, the linguistics of writing and digital humanities. She has worked on personal names and migration in her previous research on medieval names in contact and currently co-leads the DESCRYPT program on the analysis and decipherment of historical writings.
Organizer
This event is co-hosted by the Thematic group on migration and the BEYOND project at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law.