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This article considers how personal name changes are situated within their sociological context in the United States. Reviewing both popular and scholarly texts on names and name changes, I draw on recent work on identity and narrative by Oriana to argue that voluntary personal name changes are made in relation to a sense of narrative elasticity or identity elasticity, and act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context. Drawing out these themes through an exploration of name changes for ethnic self-definition or religious purposes, I conclude with a reflection on the unstable social balance between an individual’s interest in self-expression and society’s priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere.

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Librarians in America and Europe find that social scientists rely heavily on journal articles, specialized data, and feedback from colleagues in directing their research. This project uses 21 ethnographic interviews with librarians, students, and faculty at "Atameken University" in post-Soviet Kazakhstan to explore how social scientists adjust such research habits to a context of distant information sources and limited access. By developing technological adaptations to the local context, expatriate scholars can surmount most barriers to access-and yet librarians are then less able to effectively support research. Increased access to information and skilled librarians remains essential for Eurasian universities seeking to support world-class research in the developing world.

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