‘That’s not my name’: Identity work by university students with minoritised names

Abstract

This article examines the experiences of students whose minoritised names meant they were misnamed by university staff. Drawing on qualitative findings from a study of the pronunciation of students’ names in universities in England, we use sociological concepts such as identity work, embodied named identities and institutional whiteness to analyse students’ accounts of what they did, or did not do, in response to misnaming. We argue that, in the context of power relations circulating within universities, including race and racism, students’ identity work entailed a calculation of the benefits and costs of correcting misnaming by university staff, alongside multiple and complex interpretations of, for example, the specific locale of an incident and/or the type and duration of interaction with university staff. We conclude by suggesting ways that equality, diversity and inclusivity policy and practice in higher education can better develop to rebalance power relations and thereby ease the heavy identity workload carried by students with minoritised names and minoritised ethnicities.

Introduction

Names matter for people’s identities: they are foundational for an individual’s civil-legal identities, as well as their familial affiliations, and socio-cultural identities such as gender and age (Finch, 2008; Pilcher, 2015). People’s names also signal ethnic heritages of race, religion, language and/or nationality (e.g. Edwards and Caballero 2008; Wykes 2017). Growth in numbers of international students and students of Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnicities studying at universities in the UK (Department for Education 2021; Universities UK 2018) means that in recent decades student populations have become less monocultural, mononational and/or monolingual. Relatedly, the names of students are also likely to have become increasingly culturally diverse. However, and despite its close links to race and ethnicity, diversity in the names of university students is an under examined topic. In this article, we offer new empirical and theoretical understandings of the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names. We draw on qualitative data from a study of students’ names in English universities and focus on students whose non-ethnically English names, or atypical ethnically English names, meant they could experience being misnamed by university staff. Using concepts such as identity work (e.g. Wagner et al., 2017), embodied named identities (Pilcher, 2015) and institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012), we analyse students’ accounts of what they did, or did not do, when misnamed by university staff. We show that students’ identity work in response to misnaming entailed a reflexive scoping of situations in which misnaming by university staff had occurred and was accomplished within the context of multifarious systems of power relations circulating within university locales, including race and racism. In our conclusion, we suggest ways that policy and practice can develop to better address the diversity and inclusion implications of cultural diversity in students’ names, to rebalance unequal power relations within universities, and thereby ease the heavy identity workload borne by students with minoritised names and minoritised ethnicities.

The significance of students’ names in educational locales

In education, as in other types of institutions and organisations, names are the linchpins of everyday interaction and a key component of administrative systems through which information about people is managed (Pilcher, 2015). Policies and practices of anonymous marking in the education sector suggest that students’ names are thought relevant to the powerful institutional positioning of educators vis-a-vis students and thereby to the upholding of principles of equality. In anonymous marking schemes, the names of students on assessments are replaced by, for example, numerical codes, thereby masking their identities. Anonymous marking, widely adopted within universities, including in England, is argued to reduce conscious and unconscious bias by assessors (Sharp and Zhu 2020), whether on grounds of familiarity with a particular student, or linked to key types of discrimination including racism. There is also recognition within some universities that students’ names especially matter during their graduation ceremony. In England, for example, the London School of Economics (2024) has administrative procedures to try and ensure that graduating students’ names are publicly pronounced correctly.

Research evidence on the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names in education is, however, limited, and data for the UK are especially lacking. Researchers have examined the ‘voluntary’ use of typically English ethnic first names by international students studying in English-speaking countries. Such ‘voluntary renaming’ is argued to be a pragmatic, preemptive response by students, worried that host educators might not be able to write, spell, pronounce or remember their original names (Harris 2016; Smitt 2019. See also Ammigan et al., 2023; Chen 2016; Zhao and Biernat 2018). There are also north American studies of the ‘involuntary’ naming experiences of students whose ethnicities are minoritised within elementary, middle and/or high school levels of education (Bucholtz 2016; Kohli and Solórzano 2012) or within universities (Payne et al., 2018; Pennesi 2014). Mispronunciations of students’ names by educators are argued by researchers to be ‘racial microaggressions’ (Kohli and Solórzano 2012: 445) which (re)produce racialized cultural paradigms of privilege and power (Payne et al., 2018) and result in ‘indexical bleaching’, or the removal of the ethno-racial sociocultural information encoded in students’ names (Bucholtz 2016: 275). Evidence shows that students with minoritised ethnic identities and names can feel ‘othered’ and can experience anxiety and shame about their names (Kohli and Solórzano 2012; Payne et al., 2018). Consequently, some rename themselves as a coping strategy (Kohli and Solórzano 2012; Payne et al., 2018) and/or to avoid the ‘tiresome’ task of always having to teach others how to pronounce their name correctly (Pennesi 2014). Conversely, when ethno-racial sociocultural information encoded in names is respected in educational settings, including through correct pronunciation by educators, students are reported to feel a sense of belonging, of empowerment, and to feel proud of their names and of the ethnic heritage they signal (Payne et al., 2018; Zhang and Noels 2021). Yet, some evidence suggests that misnaming by educators may bother some students more than others. In Zhang and Noels’ (2021) study of 173 international students studying at a Canadian university, there was a 50:50 split between those who regarded name pronunciation as important and those who regarded it as unimportant.

In this article, we extend knowledge and understanding of the cultural significance of students’ names in education by drawing on qualitative data from a study of students’ names in English universities. Our focus is on students whose non-ethnically English names, or atypical ethnically English names, meant they could experience being misnamed by university staff (for a discussion of university staff experiences of non-ethnically English or atypical ethnically English students’ names, see Pilcher et al., 2024). Our argument is underpinned by theorisations of identities as social processes (Lawler 2014; Scott 2015). In other words, we understand people’s identities as interactively and collaboratively (re)produced through ‘identity work’ (e.g. Wagner et al., 2017) of co-construction and interpretation in different locales (e.g. Goffman 1956, 1968; Mead 1934) and as being conditioned by relations of power (Lawler 2014; Scott 2015), including racism and ethnicity (Cross et al., 2017). The concept of ‘embodied named identities’ (Pilcher, 2015) positions people’s names as entwined with their bodies (Lawler, 2014; Shilling, 2012) in the co-constructive and interpretative processes of identity work, including what Cross et al. (2017: 1) have called ‘ethnic-racial’ identity work. In this article, we draw on these ideas to analyse the identity work students with minoritised names and ethnicities do, or do not do, when misnamed by university staff and in response to the challenge to their embodied named identities that misnaming represents.

Methods

Data presented and analysed in this article come from an exploratory mixed-methods study of the pronunciation of university students’ names, undertaken in England in 2021–2022. There were three elements of the students’ names study: an England-wide survey of universities to ascertain policy and practice on the pronunciation of students’ names; one-to-one video call interviews with student-facing university staff working in England about their experiences of the pronunciation of students’ names; and creative writing methods and/or follow-up semi-structured one-to-one video call interviews to capture the ‘name stories’ of university students with minoritised names. We describe in detail only this last part of the study in line with the focus in this article on university students’ experiences of misnaming.

We used social media callouts and our own social networks to recruit university students who had a story to tell about their name and its pronunciation in higher education. Eligible participants had completed at least 2 years of undergraduate study in England. We eventually recruited 22 participants (17 women and 5 men) from 11 different universities in England. Ten participants said they were international students, and 12 were ‘home/EU’ students. Participants’ self-identified ethnicities included Black British Caribbean, British Malaysian, British Arab, British Nigerian, British Punjabi Indian, White British, Asian Indian, Indian, Chinese Malaysian, Malaysian, Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian and Polish. Most (19 out of 22) of our student participants shared their name stories by completing a creative writing booklet and a follow-up semi-structured one-to-one interview by video call (two chose only to complete a creative writing booklet). Both research tools were designed to elicit students’ name-related experiences during their university studies. Student participants were given compensation for their time in the form of a voucher (of up to £25) redeemable at a major international online retailer. Qualitative data from the students’ creative writing and/or interviews were thematically analysed (Miles and Huberman 1994), with codes developed from research questions, participants’ responses and in dialogue with existing sociological work on names and identities, including in education (e.g. Payne et al., 2018; Pilcher, 2015) and on race and racism in higher education (e.g. Ahmed 2012; Bhopal and Pitkin 2020).

All student participants in the study were given the option of using either their own name or a self-chosen pseudonym, or a pseudonym carefully chosen by researchers to reflect the socio-cultural identities information encoded in their original name. Similarly, surnames (‘family names’) mentioned in name stories or in interviews were pseudonymised by researchers to reflect participants’ original surnames (for a detailed discussion of the choice and use of participants’ ‘real’ names and/or pseudonyms in qualitative research, see Deakin-Smith et al., 2024). The universities where the students studied were given false names chosen by researchers. Transcriptions of the interviews, generated by video call software, were checked and then anonymised, after which the video call recordings were destroyed. Identifying information in the students’ written name stories was also anonymised. The students’ names study operated within ethical protocols of informed consent, anonymity, confidentiality and data protection (British Sociological Association 2017) and received a favourable opinion from the relevant ethics committee at Nottingham Trent University.

Pilcher, whose names are ethnically English, was motivated to research the pronunciation of students’ names because of their own experiences as a white British person and mono-lingual university lecturer unsure how to pronounce some ethnically minoritised students’ names. As well as misnaming others, Pilcher has lived experiences of being subjected to misnaming, although not in relation to ethnicity and race. Deakin-Smith, a white British person whose names are ethnically English, was the researcher on the study. Both of us recognise racism to be an everyday, structurally and systemically engrained feature of social life. We are white, British people with ethnically English names researching the experiences of people with minoritsed names and ethnicities: we acknowledge that our positionalities impacted on the research process and our findings (e.g. Ríos and Patel 2023; Yip 2023).

Findings

Identity work by university students in response to misnaming

[At university], they have a more kind of awareness of people and peoples’ names and backgrounds and... my experience …. was a very positive one and again, even though I was probably one of few ethnic minorities... So overall I would say from start to finish it was a very, very positive experience (Jatinder Puri, home/EU student, Carbury University).

Among our 22 participants, Jatinder’s experience of his name while studying at university was the most wholly positive. In contrast, the other students reported rather more mixed experiences, including where university staff had misnamed them, for example, by mispronouncing, or misspelling or mis-ordering their name. Unlike Zhang and Noels (2021), we found that most students in our study were troubled by these ‘negative naming incidents’ (Pennesi 2017: 28); many used words like ‘frustrating’, ‘annoying’ and ‘irritating’ to describe how misnaming had made them feel. Their individual identity was tightly bound up with their names and, often, their cultural heritage too.

I’ve always moderately liked my name, but in hindsight, ever since I came to the UK and mixed in, my name served as a sort of ‘way back home’ reminder for my culture and family. It makes me feel special and unique, also in some sense, powerful (Sooyeon Li, international student, Whitford University: creative writing).

For these reasons, most of the students in our study who had experienced misnaming by university staff found it to be disrespectful, as well as irritating. In this article, we explore students’ accounts of their identity work in response to misnaming by university staff – what they did or did not do when their name was mispronounced or misspelt, for example – and the reasoning behind these actions. Our findings on students’ identity work are presented using two intertwined and recurrent themes that emerged from our thematic analyses of students’ interview and/or creative writing data. The first theme is the power relations circulating within universities as hierarchical, white and English institutional spaces which meant that students with minoritised names weighed up the benefits of correcting their misnamers against the costs of doing so. A second and related theme is ‘scoping’, which captures the multiple complexities of students’ interpretations of the locales in which they had been misnamed by university staff and how these interpretations influenced what students did or did not do about it.

‘I just feel bad correcting someone like that’: Power relations in students’ identity work

A generalised principle of communication present in most social relationships (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1956) is that, in the words of our participant Shahanna Banerjee (home/EU student, Carrowton University), ‘you want social interactions to be smooth’. Shahanna explained that this social norm was ‘usually the reason why I don’t correct [mispronunciation of my name by] people’. Normative expectations for ‘smooth’ interactions can be recognised, then, as an amorphous barrier that can inhibit corrective identity work by individuals in response to misnaming by others. Students who were misnamed by university staff were also interacting within the more specific power hierarchies of universities as institutional spaces (Ahmed 2012). Students have a subordinate status compared to university staff who are advantaged by their institutional roles and, oftentimes, by the intersection of their positionalities (e.g. gender, social class and ethnicity). For example, along with the institutional roles university staff members have, they are also typically older than students. This seniority of staff meant that some students were reluctant to correct an incident of misnaming:

Especially if it's a person who's older to me, like a lecturer, I would never again try to correct the person 'cause I'm scared. Like I feel, I don't know. I just feel bad correcting someone like that. The fact that I did it once was like a big thing for me (Aamir Khan, international student, Regisby University).

Similarly, Maria Andrysiak (home/EU student, Hogstown University) said in her interview that she would not ‘feel comfortable correcting, like, a lecturer’. The multifarious power relations circulating within universities and the resultant subordination of students – and especially of those who are ‘not white’ (Arday et al., 2022) – meant that students who wanted to correct their misnamers therefore had to find courage to do so.

I know some people maybe feel that name spelling isn't that significant, but for me it's, it's just like a basic identity thing…...You know, having to, I guess, pluck up the courage and just go into the office and highlight something that may have seemed so trivial (Safiyyah Yadlapalli, home/EU student, Hogstown University).

In several cases, and mindful of the status of their educators and the power they had, students were worried about negative consequences if they were to correct misnaming:

At university, I think I haven't corrected anyone with my surname because I'm not trying to piss off anyone… Yeah, for sure 'cause they are the ones who are checking my assignments and exams. And yeah, I wouldn't be so comfortable (Reka Kovács, international student, Carbury University).

I think I would be rude to stop to tell them [how to say my name] and do not want them to think I am being troublesome or rude. They will mark my work with my name, so I try to be friendly and not seem cross about my name (Baako Ahamed, home/EU student, Tanton University: creative writing).

It may be that anonymous marking of students’ work (Sharp and Zhu 2020) was not practised at these students’ universities, or they were unaware of the policy or distrusted it. Either way, the responses of Reka and Baako suggest a concern that the unequal power relations between students and teaching staff could enable staff to act in retribution if their misnaming was corrected by a student. Other students explained more obliquely that they had not corrected misnaming by university staff because they did not want to be seen as ‘trying to make problems in the classroom’ (Patrice Césare, home/EU student, Bartonville University) or as ‘disturbing [the] class’ (Shahanna Banerjee, home/EU student, Carrowton University).

Misnaming was linked by several students to feelings of being ‘othered’ in contexts of the minoritisation of ethnicities within what can be described as the system of institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012) of their universities, whereby white people, their bodies and cultural norms (and we specify here, their names) are systemically privileged as the norm. For example, Safiyyah Yadlapalli (home/EU student, Hogstown University) wrote in her name story that misspelling of her name had happened ‘multiple times’ at university, leading her to conclude that ‘certain staff members were failing to uphold the “inclusive” part of the [university’s] equality, diversity and inclusivity statement’. In contexts of institutional whiteness and the all too often merely symbolic addressing of racism through equality policies (Ahmed 2012), students with minoritised names and ethnicities might choose not to correct incidents of misnaming because they did not want to draw attention to their ‘difference’.

There’s a cost-benefit to it…In some situations I feel like it would have just singled me out [to correct the mispronunciation], which I wouldn't have wanted, because when you're, when you look different than everybody in the room already, you're already singled out. You, already, the only brown person in the room. Um, add a name to that. That's two things that are, that are, separating you from a group, which is not what you want in certain situations (Vanika Tripathi, international student, Whitford University).

As ‘the only brown person in the room’, Vanika’s embodied named identity work was framed by institutional whiteness of her university. The ‘cost-benefit’ ratio, as Vanika put it, of correcting misnaming by university staff was then especially risky for students with minoritised names who also had minoritised embodied identities because of their ‘not white’ (Arday et al., 2022) skin. In her interview, Vanika spoke about an incident – ‘the worst’ she had experienced, and the worst reported to us in our study – where she had miscalculated the benefit and cost of correcting a misnamer. The incident occurred when Vanika had corrected a (white) professor’s mispronunciation of her name in a one-to-one meeting in the professor’s office. According to Vanika, the professor responded by saying to her: ‘“You’re a student and you’re a brown student on top of that, so you should be grateful that I’m trying to say your name at all”’. This was an overtly racist response to Vanika’s attempt to establish her preferred embodied named identity in the context of her university’s institutional whiteness. It is also revealing of generalised ideas about the subordinate status of students within universities locales and which frame the identity work of all students with minoritised names.

Our data also reveal how white students (whether international or home/EU students) with minoritised names engaged in identity work in response to being misnamed by university staff. Hogstown University student Alicja Kaminski said that the Polish heritage of her name meant that university teaching and professional services staff had made erroneous assumptions about her nationality and her status as a ‘home’ student: ‘just because somebody has a foreign name doesn’t necessarily mean that they are from out the country, and they weren’t born in the UK’. Our data here contribute to the understanding of experiences of white ethnicities in daily interactions and in different contexts (Lambert-Swain 2023). We argue that the name-related identity work of Alicja and other white students with non-ethnically English names (e.g. international student Reka Kovács of Carbury University and home/EU student Maria Andrysiak of Hogstown University) took place in a context of power relations of ‘institutional Englishness’. Related to Ahmed’s (2012) institutional whiteness, our concept refers to the systematic privileging within English universities of the English language, of ethnically English cultural norms and, our focus in this article, of names, and the consequential minoritisation of, for example, ethnically Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Polish languages, cultures and names (see also Wheeler 2016).

To correct or not to correct misnaming? Scoping the locale

We have drawn from our data to show that students’ responses to misnaming – what we conceive as their embodied named identity work – were framed by multiple types of power relations between themselves and university staff, including institutional whiteness and institutional Englishness. These various and intertwined power relations were barriers which, from students’ perspectives, made correcting their misnamers a risky option. Within this broader context, students in our study told us that their response to misnaming also depended on their interpretation of the ambiance of the precise milieu of a misnaming incident. In other words, before deciding whether to correct their misnamer, students undertook nuanced, reflexive, interpretive identity work by skillfully ‘scoping’, for example, the specific locale of an incident and/or the type of interaction with university staff. For example, Alicja Kaminski (home/EU student, Hogstown University) said in her interview that she would not correct mispronunciation of her name by professional services staff, like ‘library staff’, because ‘it’s such a brief interaction. There is no point in doing it’. Likewise, for Hadassah Masud (home/EU student, Hogstown University), ‘if it’s like a one time talk or one time lecturer that I probably won’t see again, chances I’ll probably leave it just because, you know’.

In contrast, misnaming by educators within reoccurring encounters, including those likely to take place over months or years, was regarded by most students as a situation worthy of corrective identity work (see also Pennesi 2014). These types of ‘power-full’ interactions are likely to be more consequential for the enactment, accomplishment and management of embodied named identities. In such scenarios, students with minoritised names and ethnic identities reported that they considered when to correct and how to correct depending on the specific locale within which misnaming had occurred. A key factor here was if the misconstruction of a student’s embodied named identity by an educator took place in what Goffman conceptualised as the ‘front stage’ (in public and with an audience), or in the more hidden and private ‘backstage’ (Goffman 1956).

I think in smaller settings, especially in classes where I have friends in and they know that that's not the way my name is pronounced, I've, I feel more obliged to correct the teacher just because you know, there are people there who know how you are supposed to pronounce it, and I don't want them to suddenly think that that's how my name supposed to be pronounced (Ayena Shaneez Binti Azeem, international student, Carrowton University).

I mean, if it's, if we are in a lecture of 300, 400 people, we’re not gonna stop and just have a discussion about my name. If I know the answer, I'm saying the answer… But when it's more like a one-to-one type thing… (Reza Castillo, home/EU student, Hogstown University).

In front-stage classroom settings, students’ identity work in response to misnaming therefore included weighing up the quantitative size and/or qualitative significance of the ‘audience’ of their peers. Before doing corrective identity work, whether in the front stage of a classroom or, as was more likely, in a one-to-one backstage or offstage meeting with a misnamer, students might also consider how often the same educator had misnamed them over time. It was especially repeated mispronunciations by educators that motivated students with minoritised names to assert their preferred embodied named identity:

You know what, I feel like I'm more of, OK, if they do it once. Whatever. If they do it twice. OK. And then three. Sounds like you start to notice that. OK, this is like a thing in their head that this is how you say my name. I don't know. I tried to sort of go [to correct them] maybe towards the end or maybe like separately. I don't really like addressing things in a group setting (Hadassah Masud, home/EU student, Hogstown University).

I let it lie the first time ‘cause I usually just want to sort of get on with the lecture, but if it becomes an ongoing thing then I'll say something. And so, like I tried to sort of get to a point where I maybe see them face to face and go, ‘You know my name is Annaline by the way’ and do it that way rather than stopping a lecture to do it (Annaline Evans, home/EU student, Bartonville University).

Again, locales matter: Hadassah and Annaline both chose not to correct mispronunciation of their names at the point of occurrence – front stage with an audience of peers – but to do it later in one-to-one, off-stage encounters. Irrespective of front stage, backstage or offstage locales, several students spoke about having to ‘read’ the personality and/or body language of university staff when working out the cost-benefit ratio of correcting them.

I have to read the person and their reactions. So, if the reaction is quite standoffish or they're saying sorry that they mispronounced it, but they're not really that bothered, they don't even care to listen to how to pronounce it, and they just move on with the day. That's where I wouldn't bother (Alicja Kaminski, home/EU student, Hogstown University).

My last name is so long that, like, when a teacher looks at it, it’s like ‘I just don't know, I’m not even gonna try’ and then moves on to the next person. And so, I notice this is, because in the first few lessons I would see her look at me and then, something starts to form on her lips like she’s like, trying to pronounce the name and then she's like, ‘you know what, never mind’. And then she just calls the person next to me.....So, [eventually] I went up to her to tell her how to properly pronounce my name (Ayena Shaneez Binti Azeem, international student, Carrowton University).

In the context of their less powerful positioning in the university hierarchy and its institutional whiteness and/or Englishness, corrective identity work by students was not always successful. This left students with the dilemma of what, if anything, to do next.

I told the lecturer that you need to spell my name Aamir and…. [they] did say, ‘Oh, OK, sorry for getting that wrong’. So, I was like, OK fine…. But in the end.…when [they] gave me my feedback, [they] still got my name wrong. So, I’m like this doesn't feel good and I didn't want to correct [them] the second time. I just like left it…. I just, I guess my name is now Amir (Aamir Khan, international student, Rannonbury University).

There was a certain professor… and after correcting [them], [they] just kept saying it wrong anyway… so I just let [them] do it. And you know, sometimes you don't have the energy to do it either (Alicja Kaminski, home/EU student, Hogstown University).

As implied by Alicja, repeatedly having to do corrective embodied named identity work can be tiresome or, as described by Safiyyah Yadlapalli (home/EU student, Hogstown University), ‘exhausting’ (see also Pennesi 2014). The failure of corrective identity work in interactions with university staff could dissuade students from trying again, at least with the same misnamer. In such circumstances, students like Alicja and Aamir might opt to tolerate incidents of misspelling or mispronunciation – even if, as described by Aamir, this outcome is experienced as a form of involuntary renaming (see also Payne et al., 2018). Earlier, we quoted international student Ayena (Carrowton University) describing how she had corrected mispronunciation of her name, especially in smaller classes in front of her friends, and had also advised a lecturer, who had avoided saying her name, how it should be pronounced. Yet (perhaps because she did not always have the energy to correct misnaming), Ayena also said she had at times responded to a name that sounded like hers: 'I'm quite lucky in that no one in my class has a name that's even like remotely close to sounding like mine, so even like Anna, I will respond to’. Likewise, international student He Mii (Alderton University) said that university staff did not pronounce her name ‘100% correctly’ but she nonetheless responded to the typical mispronunciation (‘they would tend to go with ‘hey me”’): ‘I would accept it’. He Mii’s ‘acceptance’ is notable because, in tonal languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese, mispronunciation can fundamentally change the meaning of words that are said (e.g. Gandour and Ananthanarayan 2016).

For Kirke Liiv (international student, Regisby University), not knowing how her name might get pronounced by lecturers meant she felt she always had ‘to be, like, very alert’. In other words, in addition to listening to and trying to understand lesson content, Kirke’s concentration was attuned to recognising an approximation of the correct pronunciation of her name by an educator. Otherwise, the chance to demonstrate her knowledge and contribute to the class might pass her by. Kirke’s experience underlines how, particularly in classroom settings, the embodied named identity work done by students with minoritised names and ethnicities is ‘extra’ to the work routinely expected of and undertaken by other students. For some, this extra work was experienced as a burdensome detraction from their primary goal of learning. In the words of Safiyyah Yadlapalli (home/EU student, Hogstown University), ‘I’ve got big, bigger things to be worrying about than the spelling of my name’.

The highly crafted, processual and co-constructive character of students’ interpretive identity work in response to misnaming by university staff is evident in these data. To work out what to do (if anything at all) when they had been misnamed required heightened levels of alertness and energy by students and entailed reflexive, agile strategizing and the consideration of factors such as who the misnamer was, where the incident took place and how often misnaming had occurred or was likely to occur in the future. Students’ identity work in response to misnaming was also processual in that it could change over time. One student described her eventual realisation that her toleration of misnaming had impacted negatively on her opportunities for learning, and this motivated her to assert her preferred embodied named identity, or at least to do so more often:

Actually, I didn't realize how demoralizing it was until my second year. In my first year I thought that it was completely fine. Then I realized that you know, like it affects your class contribution, it affects how your teachers perceive you (Ayena Shaneez Binti Azeem, international student, Carrowton University).

Learning from the experience of being misnamed during their university studies – and perhaps linked to their growing maturity and confidence over time – was also a feature in the accounts of other students. For example, Aabir Sharma (international student, Rannonbury University) said his name was misspelt so often that he eventually learnt to preempt it by spelling out his name each time he met a new member of the university staff: ‘Nowadays I am so used to it, I say my name and spell it out in the very next second’. Patrice Césare (home/EU student, Bartonville University) used a different type of preemptive identity work after she had been at university for a while. In her name story, Patrice wrote how her original first name had so often been mispronounced including by university staff that she reached a point where she voluntarily ‘chose’ to rename herself: ‘I chose to use my second name “Patrice” throughout my time at university…as it was more common and easier for others to say and identify’. Other studies have noted self-renaming as a means by which students, especially international students, cope with actual or anticipated misnaming by their educators (Harris 2016; Kohli and Solórzano 2012; Payne et al., 2018; Smitt 2019). However, Patrice was the only student in our study who said they had coped with misnaming by changing their name for (almost) their whole time at university. As we have shown, other students who experienced misnaming, and depending on their energy levels, courage and their scoping of the milieu, either tolerated it, or tried to correct misnamers and thereby reclaim some power in the otherwise unequal co-construction of their embodied named ethnic identities through their interactions with university staff.

Conclusion: ‘It’s a basic identity thing’

In this article, we have examined the identity work that students with minoritised names did, or did not do, in response to being misnamed by university staff and so also to the inaccurate construction of their embodied named ethnic identities that misnaming represented. In so doing, we extend sociological knowledge and understanding of the significance of cultural diversity of names within the organisational and institutional settings of education, and specifically, higher education. First, our data on experiences of misnaming among students with minoritised names and ethnicities studying in England adds to existing, mostly north American, evidence on this otherwise under researched topic. In the contemporary informal culture of communication between staff and students characteristic of English universities, we found that misnaming by university staff related especially (although not always) to students’ first names (i.e. to their ‘given’ or forenames). This finding is significant for two reasons. Elias (1991[1987]) argued that people’s identities as individuals (their ‘I’ identities) are embedded especially in their first names. Indeed, research shows that voluntary change of first names is rare compared to voluntary change of surnames (Alford 1988). To have one’s first name mispronounced, misspelt or avoided may, therefore, be especially meaningful. Moreover, first names can signal ethnic heritage separately from, as well as in combination with, what Elias (1991 [1987]) called the ‘We’ identities of surnames. Mispronunciation and misspelling of students’ first names by university staff could therefore be argued to, at least, distort, or at worst, to erase, ethnoracial sociocultural information encoded in these names (Bucholtz 2016). Annaline Evans (home/EU student, Bartonville University), whose first name (like that of home/EU student Maria Andrysiak of Hogstown University) was pronounced a-typically to its spelling, put it this way: ‘It is an unusual name, but it’s my name and it’s me and it’s a big part of who I am, so’.

Our second contribution to knowledge and understanding about the cultural diversity of names derives from our conceptualisation of ‘identity work’ to capture what students did, or did not do, in response to misnaming by university staff. Our data show that students’ identity work included tolerating misnaming by university staff (at least, on occasion) and/or challenging it (again, on occasion) by correcting their misnamers and thereby asserting their preferred embodied named identity: ‘That’s not my name’ (Hadassah Masud, home/EU student, Hogstown University). We excavated from our data the multiply complex micro-scale reflexive interpretive identity work that students with minoritised names did in interactional encounters with university staff who had misnamed them. In assessing their misnamer, and the locale, significance and frequency of misnaming, and so on, students made skillful and nuanced interpretations to help them decide whether, and how, to get university staff to correctly pronounce and/or to spell their names (or even to say their names at all), and thereby to respect their embodied named ethnic identities. We have argued that this identity work, in the context of universities as institutions imbued with multiple complex and interrelated systems of power including racism, not only required personal reserves of courage and energy but was additional to and could be experienced as a distraction from the learning work inherent in the generalised role of ‘student’. Our findings show that having a minoritised name adds to the ‘weight of institutional whiteness’ carried by students with minoritised ethnicities (O’Neill 2024: 2). We argue that identity work around names feeds into the loss of time and energy that ethnically minoritised people – in our example, university students – experience as they have to learn how to exist within racist, white spaces (Andrews 2023).

Third, and relatedly, we have theorised how the identity work of students with minoritised names is conditioned by multifarious power relations including racism, institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012) and institutional Englishness, alongside the more generalised subordinated status of students vis-a-vis university staff and of norms that privilege ‘smooth’ social interactions (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1956). These relations of power we identified were barriers that made it difficult, and risky, for students to correct the inaccurate co-constructions of their embodied named identities by university staff who had misnamed them.

In this article, we have analysed the experiences of one group of actors (university students) in one type of institution (universities) and have shown that, as elsewhere, names are ‘power-full’, (re) producing embodied identities, relationships and inequalities through the ideas, values and meanings they contain and convey (Pilcher, 2017; Pilcher, 2015). Our qualitative study richly details some aspects of misnaming experienced by some university students in England but we recognise its limitations. Importantly, our findings are conditioned by our own white, English, embodied named positionalities as university researchers studying experiences of students who were mostly ‘not white’ (Arday et al., 2022). Within our small-scale qualitative study we could not systematically compare the identity work around names undertaken by students of different ethnicities. However, and as international student Vanika Tripathi’s encounter with a racist professor suggests (see above), the misnaming experiences of ‘not white’ students with minoritised names were likely to be additionally complex, multiple and challenging. Further, our study included participants with minoritised names who were ‘home/EU’ students as well as those who identified as ‘international’ students. Again, the small scale of our qualitative study meant we could not systematically compare the identity work of these two groups of students. However, as with students of differing ethnicities, we can surmise that specific power relations conditioned the identity work of international students with minoritised names and ethnicities. For example, and of course, depending on country of origin, international students might not speak English as their first language, or they might hold educators and/or ‘elders’ in particularly high esteem, or they might be fearful of jeopardising their student visa and so their right to remain in England. For these kinds of reasons, international students may be especially cautious about correcting misnaming by university staff.

Our focus in this article is what students did or did not do in response to being misnamed by university staff. For reasons of space, we were unable to explore deeply students’ affective responses to misnaming, or their experiences of being misnamed by fellow students. Nor were we able to examine how online learning under lockdown conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-22 impacted students’ experiences of misnaming. Likewise, we were unable to discuss how cultural differences in name sequencing meant that students named under, say, Cantonese or Mandarin naming conventions (where surnames are written first followed by ‘given’ names) experienced misnaming through mis-ordering. There is, then, plentiful scope for further research on the significance of cultural diversity in students’ names, including within UK primary and secondary education, and within the linguistic and/or cultural contexts of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish universities.

The pronunciation of students’ names: Breaking down institutional whiteness in universities

As our own findings suggest, identity work in settings such as higher education is enacted within contexts conditioned by the operation and reproduction of institutional power in its various and complex forms including racism (Ahmed, 2012; Brown, 2022). Our data on students’ identity work in response to being misnamed by university staff position the cultural diversity of names, and particularly the pronunciation of students’ names, as key issues of equality, diversity and inclusivity. We argue that because of their subordinated status in the hierarchies of their university, students and especially those who were ‘not white’ (Arday et al., 2022), had less power than university staff in the co-construction of their embodied named identities. Our findings on misnaming add to an emerging collection of evidence that gives voice to experiences of racism and whiteness among racially minoritised students in UK universities (O’Neill 2024).

Universities are an example of what Petriglieri and Petriglieri (2010) term ‘holding environments’ which can enable and/or constrain the identity work of individuals within them. Informed by our findings, we think there are three key ways that practice and policy in higher education can enable students with minoritised names and ethnicities by rebalancing inequalities in power relations between them and staff and by easing the disproportionately heavy identity workload they carry. First, and most importantly, it is necessary to shift understandings of names within university communities away from the quotidian, taken-for-granted and administrative level (Pilcher, 2015) and to the socio-cultural level, and thereby nurture a fertile ground in which to embed further change (for a pioneering example of this type of initiative, see University of Warwick, 2025). Specifically, we propose that the topic of names and identities is added to equality, diversity and inclusivity training programmes for all university staff and to induction activities for all students, whether domestic or international. Among other content, these programmes should include guidance on what to do if you are unsure how to pronounce someone’s name or if someone says your own name incorrectly – including if that someone is more powerful or less powerful than you. Second, universities should invest in software (e.g. NameCoach, 2024) specifically designed to aid the correct pronunciation of names through capturing audio recordings of individuals saying their own name. Recordings can be embedded within existing digital students’ records systems and made available to university staff. Finally, the simplest and cheapest action policy makers within universities could take is to develop a whole institution protocol, for staff and students alike, encouraging everyone to embed an audio-name recording in their email signature. As with declarations of preferred pronouns, this would help normalise declarations of preferred name pronunciation. Moreover, audio-recordings within emails are an easily distributable and widely accessible resource to support the identity work of people with minoritised embodied named identities. Together, these types of whole institution strategies would move the location of identity work by students with minoritised names and ethnicities away from the ‘front stage’ (Goffman 1956) and endow them with more power in the co-construction of their embodied named identities emergent from their interactions with university staff. In the words of our participant Safiyyah Yadlapalli (home/EU student, Hogstown University), misnaming is ‘a basic identity thing’; our findings suggest that universities – and other educational locales – need to do more to address it.