Naming

Mél Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro, Environmental Media Lab

As it turns out, naming a lab is a complicated and committed responsibility towards a field of knowledge, which is both encapsulated and claimed in and through the act of naming itself. Naming a lab is at once a gesture of branding and self-promotion, it edifies a politic, claims an intellectual space, and orients praxis. In media studies, the arts and humanities, naming a lab takes on extra meaning as it works to both situate and grasp at an emergent field, to help anchor it. Naming materializes the intellectual and emotional labour that goes into building research capacity.

So, who gets to take a name—especially one that encapsulates a wider field of research, or an emergent field? When is the best moment to name a lab—as a field is emerging, or established? Moving, or stable? What are the consequences of naming a lab, especially on shifting terrain? Who gets included, or left out? Can many labs share the same name? If we share a name, what do we owe one another? What happens to power in this context—who gets to claim a name? And who gets accused of ‘stealing’ or copying a name? What kind of communication, community-building and care go into responsibility and openly sharing a lab name? When a scholar leaves an institution, can they take the lab and its name with them, to a new institution? Must the name change to reflect this? Academically, who claims ownership of a lab name? When do labs and their names become extensions of ourselves, our communities and collective knowledge making practices (Livio and Emerson 2019)?

As a lab technique, we consider branding, claiming and instantiating as three elemental components of naming a lab in media studies, and the arts and humanities realm, with the end goal of building relational and accountable scholarly communities (Pawlicka-Deger 2020). The main takeaways we offer are that naming a lab is a public homage and recognition of work being done around a certain set of ideas, practices and politics; that it requires attention to others in this creative and intellectual realm; that it demands good communication, trust, self-reflexivity and a shared goal of community-building; and that power—where one is located, the funds they have, and the reputation the namer has—will influence the outcome of the name and how it circulates across academic realms. Naming a lab, we insist, is a technique, a way of carrying meaning across time and space.

• Naming as branding: Naming a lab is in part a gesture of branding, of giving the lab an identity, a way to be legible in the world, on campus, on social media (Duffy and Pooley 2017; Scolere, Pruchniewska and Duffy 2018). Naming a lab is also a way to render oneself visible. Branding a lab through a name means allowing people to find you, to see what you do, to make a connection with you. Branding a lab can also be construed as submitting to neoliberal ideals. Neoliberalism here means embracing the entrepreneurial values so often championed by the upper university administration. In this way, branding also means institutionalizing by locating oneself within a university space which holds its own politics—often in tension or contradiction to the critical lab space (Brown 2015; Shermer 2021). So, branding in this context often means compromising one’s own politics and submitting to the corporatized university, yet branding can also assert a new politics and offer alternatives. When branding, the lab’s name arises out of a context that is less about the university and more about a field of research—a topic or practice or concept that is ‘hot’ at a time and place, and glamorizes it, builds it up, calls to it. Branding provides shorthand for something of interest—the brand tells you it is interesting even if you are unfamiliar with it—and builds more hype. The hype, lab managers hope, eventually converts to fuel for activism and radical experimentation, which in turn is protected by the publicity and exposure of the lab’s name (CLEAR 2021).
• Naming as claiming: In the naming of a lab, we claim political, cultural, and intellectual terrain. Claiming, however, does not have to mean being the first, the best, or only (Liboiron 2021; Wershler, Emerson and Parikka 2021). While the case can be made that a name is there specifically to identify a particular group of people, space, and practice, a name can be shared while also making a clear distinction between labs. With care, acknowledgment, and differentiation, a name can be shared across institutions, to create a collective of labs. A lab located at a high-ranking US institution, for example, might claim “to be part of a long lineage of labs while at the same time positioning itself as utterly new and singular” (Wershler, Emerson and Parikka 2021: 64), or entitled to claim a name without accounting for what already exists—or simply not caring. Race, gender, location, and ability also play into how people speak about their entitlement to a name, to naming, and to making demands about renaming. The power dynamics involved in staking a claim to a name must be acknowledged by lab directors, as should a complaint about naming (Ahmed 2021). We can learn about power from the way someone chooses to exercise their entitlement to complain about a name they feel entitled to claim—as first to that name, or not. In addition to names, we have boards, we make logos, and we claim social media handles and URLs—so, many labs by the same name without acknowledgement of one another creates chaos, competition, and confusion; alternately, labs with a shared identity that work together can become a powerful network through collaboration.
• Naming as instantiating: Naming a lab transforms unwieldy fields of knowledge into concrete instances, an act that turns politics into practices. We understand the processes through which a lab is named as instantiating the values and principles of those responsible for the naming. How others react to the name, how its meaning is discerned, taken up, and refuted are representative of a claim to power to delimit who is entitled to take part in the struggle to define a field (Bourdieu 1994). Some embrace affinities and commonalities as community building. Others may regard symmetries as territorial encroachments. Yet no two labs no matter the similarities do the same work in the same place with the same people. In that way, to name a lab is to offer an interpretation of or a take on a set of problems—it cannot account for the entire realm of possibilities within a field. Naming a lab is political—how we embrace this process and instantiate it in our efforts to build community is a part of the lab, not extraneous to it. Instantiating a name, calls to those who want to be part of a movement, a vibe, an idea, a collective, especially as it extends online. Preserving the aura of a lab is part of the project of instantiation.

Dr. Mél Hogan is the Director of the Environmental Media Lab and an Associate Professor of Communication, Media and Film, at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Dr. Andrea Zeffiro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts, and the Academic Director for the Lewis and Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. She is a member of the Environmental Media Lab’s Advisory Board.