MILL - Memory and ideology in the linguistic landscape. Commemorative (re)naming in East Germany and Poland 1916-2016
Final Report Abstract
The main objective of the MILL project was to explore commemorative (re)naming by investigating ideologically-driven changes in the urban landscape of two countries throughout the past century. Three pairs of cities in Poland and Eastern Germany were targeted: (1) two large regional centres, Leipzig and Poznań; (2) two towns of local importance, Annaberg-Buchholz (henceforth AB) and Zbąszyń; (3) Frankfurt (Oder) / Słubice, which since WWII have been divided by the Oder river. This allowed us to contrastively trace the processes influencing the commemorative cityscape along three dimensions (1) nation/state (across country), (2) size (within country) and (3) time: 1916-2016. The MILL study is innovative in the following regards: its systematic and comparative nature; the unprecedented time-depth covered; the incorporation of spatial metrics from human geography into Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies. Triangulating quantitative changes in the commemorative streetscape with historical archival material and interviews with a range of stakeholders in each city allows us to examine the complex processes underlying ideologically-driven reversals in commemorative street (re)naming. The key contribution of the MILL project is thus the modelling of longitudinal repercussions of changes in state-sanctioned commemoration. Illustrating these complex processes across small and large Eastern European cities opens new horizons on the ways in which “landscape and identity, social order and power” (Rubdy) have been linked across the past hundred years. The objectives of the MILL project are summarized here. As we detail below, all were fully met. 1) to juxtapose patterns of street-renaming in six study areas across 3 dimensions: (i) time: 1916- 2016, (ii) nation: Germany and Poland, and (iii) small vs. big locality; 2) to combine quantitative methods and geographical visualisation with qualitative critical discourse analytic and ethnographic methods of data gathering and analysis; 3) to contextualise the results of quantitative analyses via media research and ethnographic interviews with a range of stakeholders in order to develop a systematic model of the complex processes surrounding commemorative street renaming; 4) to formulate a comprehensive theoretical framework for examining the spatio-temporal determinants of change in the LL based on the analysis of these six study areas; 5) to contribute to the development of best practices in analysing changes in the semiotic ecology of the urban linguistic landscape.
