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As toponymic means of inscribing urban space, street names have been addressed mainly by human geographers, who have articulated the field of critical place-name studies. In this paper, I continue the endeavor started in the previous issue published in Social Change Review of reading street names through sociological lenses. Whereas in the first part of this two-part contribution the analysis was made from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, this second and final part employs social constructionism and the utilitarian theoretical tradition in making sociological sense of street nomenclatures. First, conceiving of street names as forming discursively constructed linguistic landscapes, the paper shows how urban namescapes – the “city-text” – are written, erased, and rewritten to reflect the shifting political powers. Second, the paper examines the neoliberal processes of place branding and toponymic commodification by which street names are turned into sought-after urban commodities with transactional value on the real estate market. The paper concludes by inviting sociologists to join the conversation on street names, which should become an important topic of sociological reflection.

Street names are mundane spatial markers that besides providing a sense of orientation inscribe onto the landscape the ideological ethos and political symbols of hegemonic discourses. This review article takes stock of the existing scholarship done on the politics of street naming practices in human (political, cultural, and social) geography and rethinks these insights from sociological perspectives. Drawing on Randall Collins’ taxonomy of sociological theory, the paper interprets urban street nomenclatures along functionalist, conflictualist, constructionist, and utilitarian lines. The analysis is delivered in two installments: Part I addresses urban nomenclatures from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, while Part II (published in the next issue of this journal) approaches street names as social constructions and examines their utilitarian value. In doing so, the paper advances the argument that urban namescapes in general and street names in particular should make an important object of sociological reflection and empirical analysis. It is one of the key arguments developed in this paper that toponymy encapsulates broader and intersecting issues of power, memory, identity, language, and space which can be rendered visible through sociological analysis.

The paper examines the introduction of civic education in post-communist Romania as an educational means of civilising in a democratic ethos the children of the transition. Particularly close analytical attention is paid to a) the political context that shaped the decision to introduce civic education, b) the radical changes in both content and end purpose of civics brought about by educational policies adopted for accelerating the country’s efforts of integrating into the Euro-Atlantic structures (NATO and the European Union), and c) the actual consequences that these educational policies betting on civics have had on the civic values expressed by Romanian teenagers. The analysis rests on an extensive sample of schoolbooks and curricula of civic education, civic culture, and national history used in primary and secondary education between 1992 (when civics was first introduced) and 2007 (when Romania joined the EU). Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the paper argues that a major discursive shift had taken place between 1999 and 2006, propelled by Romania’s accelerated efforts to join the EU. Set in motion by the new National Curriculum of 1998, the content of civics textbooks went through a dramatic change from a nationalist ethos towards a Europeanist orientation. The paper identifies and explores the consequences of a substantial shift from a heroic paradigm of celebrating the nation’s identity and monumentalised past towards a reflexive post-heroic model of celebrating the country’s European vocation.

This study consists in a quantitative analysis of fashion preferences, examining various factors influencing clothing personalization. The first part of the paper sets out the theoretical framework, discussing the historical relationship between the emergence of modernity and the configuration of fashion industry. The study proceeds with detailing the regional context where the empirical research is grounded, paying particular attention to the development and current status of the region’s clothing industry. After presenting the data and the methodology, the paper discusses the empirical findings followed by their interpretation. Based on the results we argue that the level of education, marital status, shopping frequency, and the importance of clothing quality are the most important predictors in fashioning individuals’ sartorial choices as well as their preference for clothing personalization.

Extant scholarship on football stadium names is almost exclusively restricted to discussing naming rights deals as expressions of toponymic commodification. Departing from this rather strict focus, this paper sets out to examine the patterns of stadium names from a quantitative perspective that is based on a dataset comprising football stadiums from around the world (n =1485). Drawing on this empirical material, the paper conducts a multinomial logistic regression analysis focused on determining the factors that influence a stadium's name as: (a) being neutral (names carrying generic, local and/or descriptive connotations); (b) being political (names celebrating ideological values, historical dates and/or political personalities); (c) representing sports figures (names commemorating sportspersons, either former players or club officials); and (d) representing sponsorship (corporate names). The model points out that variations in stadium names are accounted for mostly by the football continental confederation, but are also influenced by a stadium's features such as capacity, year of construction and the status of being a shared venue or designated as the national stadium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cult of death and the celebration of martyrdom lay at the core of interwar fascist movements across the European continent. However, it was in the Romanian Legionary Movement (also known as the Iron Guard) that these were articulated into a full-fledged ideology of thanatic ultranationalism. In this article, I examine the spectacular fascist necropolitics staged as state-sponsored funeral performances during the short-lived National Legionary State (September 14, 1940–February 14, 1941). A detailed description of the massive campaign of exhumations and reburials of the so-called "legionary martyrs" carried out during this short time span, culminating with the grandiose ceremony organized for the reburial of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on November 30, 1940, provides insight into the legionary thanatic worldview and ritual praxis. It also sheds light on the movement's politics of commemoration, death, and afterlife and shows how these were embedded into a religious framework underpinned by theological concepts such as heroic martyrdom, vicarious atonement, and collective redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant loss. These officially declared and ceremonially performed state rituals of communion in grief provide privileged epistemic opportunities for unravelling the politics of grievability underpinning a society's willingness to mourn its dead. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting two case studies – the Colectiv nightclub fire and the flu epidemics – in order to grasp the politics of national mourning in the Romanian post-communist context. After identifying the criteria of grievability underlying the declaration of national mourning in cases of mass death as consisting in a 'chronotopic togetherness' in death that is characterised by an 'instantaneity of emotional shock,' the paper argues for enlarging these criteria of grievability so as to include the victims of socially invisible traumas inflicted by structural violence, such as those killed in epidemics and car road accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their growing incidence over the last decades, national days of mourning received curiously sparse attention throughout social sciences and death studies. This study investigates the 327 national mournings observed across European countries between 1989 and 2017 in terms of their national variance, temporal dynamics, typology of events that led to their declaration, and victimology. Drawing on a Durkheimian-inspired conceptualization of national mournings as political rites of solidarity and reconciliation, this article finds empirical support for the thesis that the frequency with which European countries declare national mourning is a negative function of a society's level of social integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted the honors of state condolences. However, despite their growing incidence, periods of national mourning have not received the due attention in social science scholarship. This study examines the patterns and politics of national mourning observed in European countries between 1989 and 2018, based on an exhaustive dataset compiled for this analytical purpose (N = 415). Periods of national mourning are understood here as instituting states of social exception during which state authorities enact ritual actions consisting in a sequence of choreographically staged performative acts meant to create a national community of grief in the face of what is framed as a socially meaningful loss. Against these considerations, the paper argues that there are two main political cultures of public mourning in Europe. Data analysis reveals that the continent is split diagonally between a sober, Northwestern and Protestant political culture of public mourning and a lavish, Southeastern one informed by the traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the street name changes brought about in Romanian cities and towns during the period of postsocialist transformations. Based on a complete dataset comprising the entire urban street nomenclature existing prior to the regime change of 1989, the paper explores the geography of postsocialist toponymic change, as well as the latter's temporal dynamic. Statistical analyses reveal major discrepancies in the scope of street name changes between Romania's historical regions. The paper argues that one important factor that structures these regional variations is the ethnopolitics played out at the level of each locality. The analysis concludes by pointing out the instrumentality of street names as a powerful means of politicising the urban landscape, as well as their vulnerability, especially in the aftermath of significant political changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of the Berlin Wall stood for a symbol of change and freedom across the socialist bloc and inspired the inhabitants in Eastern Europe to take action and revolt against dictatorial regimes. A long and often painful process of social, economic and political transformation began. Scholars grouped their research dealing with such transformations under the label of "Transitology" and the developing subfields of "transitional justice" and "memory studies" expanded and caught the academic interest. The present argument looks at the emergence and evolvement of these fields in parallel with a growing and changing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to explore the contributions of classical social thinkers to a sociological understanding of love. It builds on the premise that despite its major relevance and consequential importance in shaping both individual lives and the social world, until recently love was a heavily undertheorised topic in the sociological tradition. Moreover, the body of disparate sociological reflections that have been made on the social nature of love has been largely forgotten in the discipline’s intellectual legacy. The article then proceeds in unearthing the classics’ contributions to a sociology of love. It starts with Max Weber’s view that love promises to be a means of sensual salvation in an increasingly rationalised social world based on impersonal formal relationships. Next, it critically examines Pitirim A. Sorokin’s integral theory of love. It then moves to address Talcott Parsons’ view on love as a binding force whose social function is to integrate the conjugal couple of the modern nuclear family in the absence of the external pressures exerted by the kinship network. The article concludes by showing how these conceptualisations of love were all embedded in wider theoretical constructions set up to account for the modernisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Oliver Jens Schmitt's biography of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, this study engages into a wider reflection upon the interwar ultranationalist Romanian Legionary movement (also known as the Iron Guard). It starts by situating Schmitt's work within the recent trend of de-orientalizing the Legion of Archangel Michael, after the latter has longtime been conceived of as an exotic incarnation of the generic model of fascism at the Europe's Eastern hinterland. Engaging in a dialogue with the scholarship done in fascists studies in general and on the Legionary movement in particular, the study reflects upon the "fascisticity" of the latter. After arguing that the Legionary movement should be conceived of as a particular species of fascism, the study explores the movement's fulminant rise in Romanian politics and society. This success is accounted within a structuralist framework which insists upon the structural features of Romanian interwar societies that made possible and facilitated the movement's growth. Next, the paper focuses its analytical scope upon the role of Codreanu's charisma in integrating an otherwise internally fractured political organization. Lastly, it concludes with some reflection on Codreanu and the Legion's contested legacy in the heavily disputed politics of memory within contemporary Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on scholarship on transnationalism, this paper resorts to concepts such as "trans-ethnic identity" and "multiple social identities" for making sense of two autobiographical writings authored by scholars who articulated a leftist counter-memory in telling their life stories spanning before, during, and after Romanian socialism. The study compares and contrasts the memoirs of Andrei Roth and Ion Ianoși, arguing that their retrospective writings document the articulation of a different strand of memorialistic literature that challenges the hegemonic anticommunist politics of memory. By never recanting their leftist beliefs, their writings give voice to a Marxian counter-memorialistic account of the past that enriches the post-communist memoryscape shaped by what we suggest calling the carceral paradigm of Romanian communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gossiping is ubiquitous in social life. In every imaginable corner of society, people from all walks of life are gossiping their living acquaintances. But what happens when the "third party," i.e., the subject of gossip, is absent par excellence, not only temporarily and spatially, but definitively? Do people continue to gossip their dead acquaintances? What is the fate of gossip after its target dies? These are the questions this paper sets out to address. In doing so, it develops a non-reductionist sequential model of death as a social process in which biological death is only the starting point of the bio-social phenomenon of dying. Building on some classic anthropological theories and concepts taken from Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, the paper examines the post-mortem status of gossip in terms of the unfolding sequence of the funeral ritual in a particular Romanian cultural context. It argues that during the liminal phase covering the deathwatch and the burial, a transient "gossipless communitas" emerges around the dead one governed by the taboo against gossiping. If the dead is afterward spared from post-mortem gossip, this is due mainly to the impracticality of gossip. The paper ends by arguing that death, despite the emotional distress caused to the surviving family, brings about a reputational bless for the deceased. It does so since, under the normative jurisdiction of the saying "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" (Of the dead, nothing unless good), the memory of the deceased is being posthumously dignified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper grapples critically with Tatiana Niculescu’s historical biography on the Romanian interwar fascist Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The book, The Mistique of the Pray and the Pistol. The Life of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu is subjected to a thorough critique, which brings to the fore and sheds light on the multiple and serious issues undermining the book's academic credibility. These flaws range from problems regarding the originality of the contribution in the light of the available scholarship, questions pertaining to the work's critical apparatus, and - the most significant of them all - methodological problems concerning the use of historical documents and especially regarding the interpretation of available historical data. Drawing attention on the perils of essayistic-historical writing based on literary intuition rather than on sound methodological approaches, the paper concludes by outlining the superficial scholarship underpinning Niculescu’s work, arguing that it belongs in the category of “parafactual history.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper grapples with the cultural implications brought about by the "right to be forgotten" ruled by the European Court of Justice in May 2014. The main argument developed at length in this paper is that we are witnessing a momentous shift in the order of social memory, from an old-age paradigm of anamnesis characterized by a will to memory against the background set by a default of forgetting towards a paradigm of public amnesia characterized by a quest for privacy against an ever-expanding digital memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mnemonic battle fought over the Romanian communist past between the active forces of intellectual democratic elites and the passive resistance of the majority of the population. The former try to impose a narrative of cultural trauma regarding the communist past against the latter's popular resistance expressed by strong nostalgic attachments towards the same communist past. The paper investigates the formation of the new official consensus on the communist legacy as cultural trauma, proposing a three stage sequence of its articulation: i) the breakthrough made by detention memorialistic literature in the aftermath of 1989 Revolution; ii) the officialization of 'communism-as-cultural-trauma' narrative by the Tismăneanu Report condemning the communist regime; iii) the institutionalization of the cultural trauma narrative in the educational system. All these struggles over the memory of communism from the part of the anticommunist political elites are tacitly countered by strong popular nostalgia, as revealed by extensive survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]