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Abstract
Within the last decade, there has been an abundance of scholarly and academic attention paid towards rising political polarization in the United States and across the world in countries like India, Poland, Colombia, Britain, and Brazil (Carothers and O’Donohue, 2019). While there is no shortage of research on this topic when it comes to highly divisive subjects like immigration, women’s rights or the 2016 election, there is little theorized on the increasing phenomenon of name changes across the United States and the ways this phenomenon displays evidence of growing political cleavages within the American political sphere. This research contributes to the discussion of the removal and changing of offensive place names by specifically focusing on the name change of the “Oriental Institute” to the “Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures” (or ISAC for short) at the University of Chicago in April of 2023. In discussing this change, administration and curators cite the geographic limitations of the term as one of the major factors for the name change. While this may seem like an isolated circumstance, this particular instantiation is situated within the broader conversation of name changes taking place in the United States – as evidenced by moves across the Southern United States to remove and change the names of former Confederate leaders from schools, streets, and other public institutions.