Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice

by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid (Editor), Sarah May (Editor)

Overview

Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue.

Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises.

Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000918014
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/21/2023
Series:	Key Issues in Cultural Heritage
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	714,730
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies and director of the Cultural Heritage Research Center, Indiana University, Indianapolis.

Sarah May is a Senior Consultant in Cultural Heritage at the sustainable development consultancy, Arup.

Table of Contents

Toxic Heritage: An Introduction

ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID AND SARAH MAY

 

SECTION 1: Introduction: Framing Toxicity

 

1 Toxic Legacies of Slickens in California: A Mobile Heritage of Hydraulic Mining Debris

GARETH HOSKINS

 

Visual Essay 1: Extraction Old and New: Toxic Legacies of Mining the Desert in Southwestern Africa

MIKE HANNIS AND SIAN SULLIVAN

 

2 Of Blaes and Bings: The (Non)toxic Heritage of the West Lothian Oil Shale Industry

JONATHAN GARDNER

 

3 When Toxic Heritage is Forever: Confronting PFAS Contamination and Toxicity as Lived Experience

THOMAS W. PEARSON AND DANIEL RENFREW

 

4 Plasticity and Time: Using the Stress-Strain Curve as a Framework for Investigating the Wicked Problems of Marine Pollution and Climate Change

JOHN SCHOFIELD AND CELMARA POCOCK

 

SECTION 2: Introduction: The Politics of Toxic Heritage

 

5 Heritage-Led Regeneration and the Sanitisation of Memory in the Lower Swansea Valley

SARAH MAY

 

Case Study 1: Ghost Wrecks of the Anthropocene: An Enduring Toxic Legacy of the Pacific War

MATTHEW CARTER, ASHLEY MEREDITH, AUGUSTINE C. KOHLER, RANGER WALTER,

BILL JEFFERY, AND PAUL HEERSINK

 

6 Military Legacies and Indigenous Heritage in Canada’s Newest National Park Reserve

LISA K. RANKIN, JULIA BRENAN, DAVID M. FINCH, SCOTT NEILSEN, AND ANATOLIJS VENOVCEVS

 

Case Study 2: Trash Fires as Toxic Heritage in Palestine

SOPHIA STAMATOPOULOU-ROBBINS

 

7 Politics of Mining: Toxic Heritage in the Atacama Desert

MARINA WEINBERG AND VALENTINA FIGUEROA

 

Case Study 3: Sticky, Stinky, Squalid: The Toxic Leachate of Households’ Waste in an Area of Urban Decay in Tehran (Iran)

LEILA PAPOLI-YAZDI

 

8 Toxic Landmarking and Technoprecarious Heritage in Ghana

PETER CARSKADON LITTLE AND GRACE ABENA AKESE

 

SECTION 3 Introduction: Affected Communities, Activism,

and Agency

 

9 Reluctant Returns: Repatriating a Poisoned Past

HOLLY CUSACK-MCVEIGH

 

Case Study 4: Public Memory of Toxic Displacement: Heavy Metal Contamination and Superfund Remediation in Federally Assisted Housing Communities

ELIZABETH GRENNAN BROWNING

 

Visual Essay 2: Translating and Transforming Toxicity: Moving Between Ethnography and Graphic Art

AMELIA FISKE AND JONAS FISCHER

 

10 Preservation by Demolition: Toxic Heritage in Contemporary China

LORETTA I.T. LOU

 

11 Unwanted Legacy and Memory of the Milieu: Toxic Materials, Remediation, Habituation (Estarreja, Portugal)

FABIENNE WATEAU, CARMEM REGINA GIONGO, DANIELA FIGUEIREDO, JOHNNY REIS, AND MANUELLE LAGO

 

12 Environmental and Embodied Agro-Toxic Heritage in Rural Uruguay: From Recognition to Transition to Sustainability Among Dairy Farmers

VICTORIA EVIA, SANTIAGO ALZUGARAY, AND JAVIER TAKS

 

SECTION 4 Introduction: Narratives of Toxic Heritage

 

13 Dirty Laundry: The Toxic Heritage of Dry Cleaning in Indianapolis, Indiana

ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID, OWEN DWYER, AND GABRIEL FILIPPELLI

 

Case Study 5: When Cleaning up the Battlefields from When Times of War Have Polluted Soils in Times of Peace: A Case Study of a Silent but Visible Toxic Legacy from the Great War

DANIEL HUBÉ AND TOBIAS BAUSINGER

 

14 Toxic City: Industrial Residues, the Body and Community Activism as Heritage Practice in Glasgow

ARTHUR MCIVOR

 

Case Study 6: Rubber as (Toxic) Heritage: Amazonian Knowledge and the Rubber Industry

TIAGO SILVA ALVES MUNIZ

 

Case Study 7: Three Memory Frameworks on Chernobyl

MATTEO BENUSSI

 

15 The Toxic Anthracite = Toxic Heritage

PAUL A. SHACKEL

 

SECTION 5 Introduction: Approaches and Interventions

 

16 Environmental Justice Tours: Transformative Narratives of Struggle, Solidarity, and Activism

ANA ISABEL BAPTISTA

 

Visual Essay 3: Getting the Lead Out, One Community at a Time

GABRIEL FILIPPELLI

 

Case Study 8: Climate Museum UK: Practices in Response to the Traumasphere

BRIDGET MCKENZIE

 

17 Toxic Heritage and Reparations: Activating Memory for Environmental and Climate Justice

LIZ ŠEVČENKO         

 

Case Study 9: From Leftovers to Takeover: Latent Insurgency Amidst the System’s Remnants

ANA VALDERRAMA

 

Visual Essay 4: Taking Care of Nuclear Waste

CORNELIUS HOLTORF

 

18 Toxic and Wasted: Artists Thinking About How to Engage With Material Futures

ROSEMARY A. JOYCE

 

Conclusion: Why Toxic Heritage Matters

ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID AND SARAH MAY

 

Index