︎︎︎ SAY MY NAME
“A person’s name is the greatest connection to their own identity and individuality”
- Organisational Psychologist Joyce E. A. Russel
Say My Name is a UTS Multicultural Women’s Network (MWN) initiative that aims to increase awareness and educate the UTS community on the importance of saying a name that they have not said before.
This project aims to educate the UTS community about the ways the ongoing effects of colonisation inform how people feel comfortable and familiar with certain names, accents, and languages. Our response was to create a friendly, playful campaign which celebrates diversity, to make the experience of saying people’s names easier than they think. Through sharing these stories we are able to give a voice to the diverse community of UTS and engage them in starting conversations.
In collaboration with Misra Imran Khan, Julien Ortiz and Jessica Yoong.
See the campaign in action here!
AGDA Awards 2023 Student Digital (Digital Campaign) Merit
AGDA Awards 2023 Student Brand and Identity (Range/Series) Finalist
MULTICULTURAL WOMENS NETWORK
The “Say My Name” campaign is run by the Multicultural Womens Network, a non profit organisation that creates the space for culturally and linguistically diverse women to come together to network, professionally develop and be an influential voice for change across UTS.
SAY MY NAME
Say My Name is a campaign aiming to educate people on the importance of saying names correctly, helping to decolonise how we hear, speak and read certain names as ‘strange’ and ‘foreign’. The goals of this campaign was to ignite conversations around campus and our wider community about the need to say people’s names properly and increase empathy for the experiences of those who feel a sense of “othering” due to their names being perceived as “foreign”.
The outcomes of this project was to create a campaign with a new identity, promotional video and additional campaign material aimed towards the UTS community.
IDENTITY
Say My Name aims to show the audience that saying people’s names correctly can be a simple thing, and done so in a friendly and inviting manner. The campaign concept aims to be playful, fun and a celebration of diversity.
Say My Name was also recently launched at Vivid 2024 as a storytelling session with a panel discussion unpacking how we perceive and acknowledge names unfairly categorised as 'tricky,' 'unfamiliar,' or 'foreign'.
Say My Name Panelists from left to right: Dr Elaine Laforteza, Dr Kumi de Silva, Dr Sunil Badami, Dr Mariko Smith and moderated by Jan Fran.