Say My Name: experiences and impacts of pronunciation of names in higher education in contexts of culturally diverse student identities

The Say My Name project ran from September 2021-March 2022 and was funded by The British Academy (Award ref SRG2021\210816).<br>

This small-scale study explored how (mis)pronunciation of names is experienced by students and by staff who interact with students in higher education institutions in England. Our methods included (i) creative writing tools to capture the ‘stories’ a sample of 20 third year undergraduate students studying at universities in England had about the pronunciation of their names and follow up one-to-one semi-structured online interviews with these same students (ii) online semi-structured one-to-one interviews with a sample of 10 staff working at universities in England in either a teaching role or a student-facing professional services role. The interviews with participants ranged in duration from c.30 minutes to c.60 minutes. The creative writing data are not included in the data repository because these served as prompts for the follow-up interviews with student participants.<br>

The research produced new knowledge acquired through qualitative methods of enquiry about name-related experiences in the context of culturally diverse undergraduate student populations in higher education in England. The project and its outputs contributed to the development of institutional policies and practices aimed at improving student experiences of higher education, especially in terms of equality, diversity, widening participation and engagement issues, and broader discussions about respecting culturally diverse identities and de-colonising the university.<br>

This dataset contains: anonymised interview transcripts; a blank consent form; participant information sheet; interview guide; guide to writing a name story.