Thesis Summary
I utilized GIS in my undergraduate thesis research as I examined UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS). I became particularly interested in the relationship between what is deemed culturally important by those in power and the legacy of colonialism and racism. In my research, I broadly looked at the distribution of all 1,154 WHS with an expectation that there would be a large cluster of sites in Europe resulting from bias in qualifying criteria. I expected that this Eurocentric bias would be discernible through both a perfunctory visual examination and a quantitative analysis. The maps that I created using QGIS include the ones pictured here: three choropleths that demonstrate the number of WHS in every country, in Europe, and in Southeast Asia. I chose to utilize Europe and Southeast Asia as my case study regions due to their comparable populations and because of the often held belief that Western (European) culture is more highly regarded than Eastern (Southeast Asian) cultures. The tangible heritage that UNESCO prioritizes in their criteria for WHS encourages representational inequality as it makes the process of gaining recognition as a site less convoluted for the European nations that favor physical culture. It is unsurprising that UNESCO’s criteria favors that of the dominant Western ideals as Europeans had a large hand in creating the list and implicitly sought to emphasize their own heritage sites. If heritage was the only qualification that WHS were based on, the sites would likely reflect global population density, as the likelihood of grander cultural sites increase as population grows. Instead, biases and the legacy of colonialism implicitly alter the qualifications for sites to gain the UNESCO awarded status. This discrepancy is necessary to address because a site’s inclusion in UNESCO’s list influences the public’s opinions as to what is most important from the past and what has relevance today, so sites that are not included are ignored or deemed unimportant, despite their actual significance to the culture they belong to.
