In the Name of Wild

Dr. Vannini was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant for a research project that examines cultural meanings in the naming of natural landscapes.

World Heritage Sites are places officially recognized by UNESCO as having special cultural or natural significance. UNESCO’s descriptions of the significance of the 10 Canadian natural sites make repeated references to their “pristine,” “intact,” “undisturbed,” “spectacular,” and “wild” characteristics. Such discourse draws upon a vocabulary of nature, wildness, and wilderness that has deep historical precedents rooted in the Western binary opposition between culture vs. nature and civilization vs. wilderness. Researchers in cultural studies, however, have long disputed these notions of nature and wilderness and worked hard at unsettling this binary opposition. If we cannot take for granted what nature is, or better yet what natures are, then it is imperative to document how natures unfold. The research question driving this study, therefore, is how is nature assembled at Canada’s Natural World Heritage Sites?