Genealogies of Place: Place (Re)naming and Heritage-Making in the Global East

Dear Colleagues,

Critical place-name studies and critical heritage studies have both experienced spectacular developments in recent decades. Scholars working in critical place-name research (also known as “critical toponymies”) have departed from traditional approaches, rooted in historical linguistics focused on documenting etymological sources of place names, and have embraced social theory to reconceptualize place names as power-driven means of spatial inscription, memorial arenas, and vehicles for projecting upon the territory values, meanings, and symbols underpinned by particular ideological agendas (Azaryahu, 1996; Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu, 2010). Similarly, scholars of cultural heritage have reimagined heritage by moving beyond a largely protectionist approach dedicated to the conservation of listed monuments and artifacts enshrined as “national heritage” to articulating a critical approach that interrogates the politics of heritage-making, its processual construction and reconstructing, and the identity stakes implied in these processes (Harrison, 2012; Winter, 2013; Lähdesmäki, Thomas, and Zhu, 2019).

This Special Issue of Genealogy aims to bring together these two strands of scholarship by exploring “Genealogies of Place: Place (Re)naming and Heritage-Making in the Global East.” In this way, this Special Issue will serve as a “rendez-vous place” between two different but interrelated and interdisciplinary bodies of research that, until now, have developed their own specific pathways across social sciences and the humanities. This Special Issue seeks to extend to heritage the kind of systematic, theoretically informed attention that toponymies in post-socialist spaces have already received.

During the period of post-socialist transformation, Central and Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia have been a “hot spot” for toponymic research (Rusu, 2021; Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2022). Researchers have investigated extensively, using a variety of methodological means from qualitative to quantitative approaches, the renaming practices that occurred in the aftermath of regime change and reconstructed the symbolic geographies of memory in post-socialist countries (Light, 2004; Gill, 2005; Gnatiuk, 2018; Rusu, 2024). In contrast, critical heritage studies continues to be largely rooted in Western Europe’s experience, which thus perpetuates a Eurocentric perspective, despite the postcolonial turn gaining momentum across the field (Gentry and Smith, 2019; Turunen, 2020). However, in recent decades, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also experienced an upsurge in heritage (Blumenfield and Silverman, 2013; Zhu and Maags, 2020) that has remained under-explored, as scholars’ attention has been captured by China’s spectacular economic, technological, infrastructural, and urban development advances. While toponymic change in post-socialist spaces has been extensively studied, critical heritage studies has yet to fully explore heritage-making in societies that have experienced or continue to experience various forms of state socialism.

Recently, in reaction to the postcolonial literature on the “Global South” (Dados and Connell, 2012), the notion of a “Global East” has emerged as a geo-cultural and socio-political category that can encompass countries with a shared history of socialist experience, but that have experienced a variety of (post-)socialist transformations since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Müller, 2020; Ikenberry, 2024; Chelcea, 2025). The geo-political concept of a “Global East” was coined to accommodate both post-socialist experiences of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia and China’s post-Mao market reform that started in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, which resulted in “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and substantially transformed China’s economy, culture, and society (Vogel, 2013; Westad and Jian, 2024).

Against this background, this Special Issue invites scholars working in the interdisciplinary fields of critical place-name studies and critical heritage studies to contribute papers that focus on regions and countries from the “Global East” (e.g., Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, China). We welcome a diverse range of methodological approaches, ranging from single-site/country cases to transnational comparative perspectives, as well as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. In terms of disciplinary anchoring, this Special Issue is open to receiving interdisciplinary perspectives, but also contributions rooted in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, geography, history, cultural and memory studies, and related fields of scholarship. Interested contributors should focus on the following topics of interest:

• Street names and renaming practices in the context of social change;
• Place (re)making and the heritagization of cityscapes;
• Spatialized memory and heritage regimes in post-socialist and transforming societies;
• Digital approaches and methodological innovations in the study of place names and heritage;
• Entangled histories, post-imperial legacies, and postcolonial perspectives on naming and heritage.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (Dr. Mihai S. Rusu, mihai.rusu@ulbsibiu.ro, and Prof. Dong Hongjie, donghongjie@xawl.edu.cn) or to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of this Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Azaryahu, M. (1996). The power of commemorative street names. Environment and planning D: Society and Space, 14(3), 311-330.

Berg, L. D., & Vuolteenaho, J. (Eds.). (2009). Critical toponymies: The contested politics of place naming. Ashgate Publishing.

Blumenfield, T., & Silverman, H. (Eds.). (2013). Cultural heritage politics in China. Springer..

Chelcea, L. (2025). Goodbye, post-socialism? Stranger things beyond the Global East. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 66(7), 874-900.

Dados, N., & Connell, R. (2012). The Global South. Contexts, 11(1), 12-13.

Gentry, K., & Smith, L. (2019). Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(11), 1148-1168.

Gentry, K., & Smith, L. (2019). Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(11), 1148-1168.

Gill, G. (2005). Changing symbols: The renovation of Moscow place names. The Russian Review, 64(3), 480-503.

Giraut, F., & Houssay-Holzschuch, M. (2022). Naming the world: Place-naming practices and issues in neotoponymy. The politics of place naming: Naming the world (1-27). Wiley.

Gnatiuk, O. (2018). The renaming of streets in post-revolutionary Ukraine: regional strategies to construct a new national identity. Acta Universitatis Carolinae Geographica, 53(2), 119-136.

Harrison, R. (2012). Heritage: Critical approaches. London: Routledge.

Ikenberry, G. J. (2024). Three Worlds: the West, East and South and the competition to shape global order. International Affairs, 100(1), 121-138.

Lähdesmäki, T., Thomas, S., & Zhu, Y. (Eds.). (2019). Politics of scale: New directions in critical heritage studies. New York: Berghahn Books.

Light, D. (2004). Street names in Bucharest, 1990–1997: Exploring the modern historical geographies of post-socialist change. Journal of Historical Geography, 30(1), 154-172.

Müller, M. (2020). In search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South. Geopolitics, 25(3), 734-755.

Rose-Redwood, R., Alderman, D., & Azaryahu, M. (2010). Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(4), 453-470.

Rusu, M. S. (2021). Street naming practices: A systematic review of urban toponymic scholarship. Onoma Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, 56, 269-292.

Rusu, M. S. (2024). Modeling toponymic change: a multilevel analysis of street renaming in postsocialist Romania. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 114(3), 591-609.

Turunen, J. (2020). Decolonising European minds through heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 26(10), 1013-1028.

Vogel, E. F. (2013). Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Westad, O. A., & Jian, C. (2024). The great transformation: China's road from revolution to reform. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Winter, T. (2013). Clarifying the critical in critical heritage studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19(6), 532-545.

Zhu, Y., & Maags, C. (2020). Heritage politics in China: The power of the past. London: Routledge.

Dr. Mihai Stelian Rusu
Prof. Dr. Hongjie Dong
Guest Editors

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• place names
• toponymy
• cultural heritage
• social memory
• Global East
• post-socialism