Mapping the political toponymy of educational namescapes: A quantitative analysis of Romanian school names

Abstract

This study sets out to map the political toponymy of Romanian schooling network. Starting from the theoretical premise that national memory is toponymically inscribed, inter alia, on a series of public organizations that form an institutional namescape, the paper reads the Romanian historical memory through the looking glass of school names. Exhaustive data was collected for the Romanian secondary schools bearing a nominal identity (N = 2850). Data were analyzed in terms of the ethnic and gender distribution, the social (occupational), spatial, and historical structures of the Romanian educational namescape. Our findings reveal that the political toponymy of the Romanian schooling network is dominated by the generations of nation-makers (intellectuals who imagined the nation in literature and the arts) and state-builders (politicians and statesmen who transformed the national community imagined by the intellectuals into a political nation-state).