Emma Nguyen, Alexander Murphy, and Emma Dierkes win SURC 2025 awards

The adoption of English preferred names among international university students who attended internationally-national secondary schools with Anglo-Saxon curricula is a unique phenomenon that reflects the intersections of cultural identity, acculturation, and assimilation. Despite extensive research on name change among migrants and international students, Asian or otherwise, as they move to Anglo-Saxon countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), little is known about the niche yet significant demographic of Asian international students who are familiar with Western culture through internationally-national schools, and how they navigate dual cultural spheres through educational, professional, and social environments.

This study investigates why these students in particular adopt English names, how they select English names, and the impact of this decision on their overall “success” in Anglo-Saxon countries. Participants were recruited using convenience and snowball sampling. Using results from 50 survey responses and 8 semi-structured qualitative interviews, this study explores Asian international students who previously studied at internationally-national schools, the impacts of using English names on their success (be it academic, social, or professional) in Anglo-Saxon countries, and their perceptions of identity. Findings reveal that English name adoption within this distinct subgroup functions as a strategy to achieve academic, social, and professional success in Anglo-Saxon countries, allowing Asian international students to present themselves as more convenient, memorable, and indistinguishable from their local counterparts. However, it may also create internal tensions between their identities, strip them of their uniqueness, and imbue within them self-doubt and the fear of being “uncovered”.

Future directions beyond understanding this phenomenon may address interviewees’ desire to reclaim their legal name as their preferred name, and the alternative factors that played into their name selection, such as gender identity or past traumas.

Masculinity studies, when investigating populations other than cisgender men, have focused largely on cisgender women or transgender men. When non-binary people are included, little distinction is drawn between them and trans men. The lack of attention to non-binary transmasculine people (who transition towards masculinity but do not identify as men) leaves questions about how they may uniquely construct masculinity, especially given West and Zimmerman’s (1987) assertion that one “does” masculinities to be read as a man, which may not be desirable for non-binary people.

This research explores how non-binary transmasculine people understand and enact masculinity. Eighteen qualitative, semi-structured interviews were used to investigate transmasculine non-binary people’s relationship to masculinities and how they enact masculinity in their lives. Preliminary findings suggest a diversity of understandings of masculinity, with common themes of masculinity as related to the physical body, and as something that is both interactional and intrinsic. Participants often expressed not wanting to be misgendered as women while also feeling uncomfortable when their enactments of masculinity meant being perceived as men. However, participants also frequently expressed a sense of freedom from gender norms and the ability to embrace femininity through their non-binary identification.

These findings have implications for expanding understandings of who needs access to gender-affirming care and for what reasons (given the reported importance of physical masculinity), and for better understanding the experiences of transmasculine non-binary people.

The concept of merit is deeply entangled with contemporary capitalism as the mechanism underlying legitimate stratification. We accept inequality because we are meant to believe that it is the result of unequal ability people are naturally endowed with. Common knowledge would tell us that capitalist and socialist societies are diametrically opposed, not only in their totality but in their working parts, and yet, throughout state socialist societies some form of merit-based selection has often emerged. Indeed, from its inception in 1949, the GDR constructed a differentiated high school education landscape, enabling some selected students to prepare for higher study, and others to first gain practical knowledge.

This begs the question: how can the social meaning of merit be understood in state socialist societies, and how does this create evaluation systems? Drawing on high school application and rejection decisions and parental appeals from 1950-52 in Brandenburg and Saxony, this paper attempts to understand how the education ministry in the GDR, which constitutionally and ideologically, promised equality and demolition of existing stratification, thought about evaluation and justified new forms of selection within education.

At the same time, this paper interrogates how parents and other key actors engaged with these new evaluatory systems. The concept of evaluation, and its product (merit), are considered through Luhmann’s treatment of education as a system, as well as through a Foucauldian understanding of modern information creation as a site of control and domination. Finally, Althusser’s theoretical framing of state domination through ideological state apparatuses, is used to motivate my inquiry into education. In particular, his claim that without radical change to key apparatuses socialist regimes risk inheriting and reproducing similar, if not the same, forms of domination they aim to destroy.

I expect this paper to illuminate unexpected ideological and practical contradictions institutionalized in the GDR.