Virtual Summit Submission

University of Missouri-Kansas City
Sociology, Political Science, Languages and Literatures

Biography

Mary is a junior at UMKC triple majoring in Sociology (Anthropology emphasis), Political Science, and Languages and Literatures (International Studies emphasis). She is interested in urban anthropology and linguistic anthropology research, particularly in combination. She is particularly interested in looking at cities worldwide to conduct comparative research projects across different languages. She intends to eventually attend graduate school for Archival Studies in the U.S., or to continue linguistic/urban anthropology research in an international graduate program.

Project

The Making of Urban Spaces in China: The Linguistic Landscape of Shanghai's Bus Lines
Urban spaces are shaped by the text within them. The collection of text in any given area is known as its “linguistic landscape” – for example, street signs and advertisements. I have traveled to Shanghai, China to spend a semester documenting and analyzing the linguistic landscape of the city. Specifically, I am collecting data on the text present on each stop of one of Shanghai’s bus lines. Which languages are used? What kind of advertisements are present? What changes occur over time? All of these questions reveal insights about linguistic social dynamics in Shanghai, which in turn have implications for the social dynamics of Shanghai’s urban spaces in general. So far, I have found that many advertisements are written in both Mandarin and English, which has implications for the ways in which English is valued as a second language in a city where almost none of the population speaks English natively. Shanghai is both a massive and rapidly developing city - it is, as of 2025, the third-largest city in the world by urban population, after Tokyo and Delhi. Patterns in Shanghai’s urban space-making practices thus have implications for the trajectory of urban development globally.