ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section 1|2 pages
Introduction: Framing Toxicity
chapter 1|14 pages
Toxic legacies of slickens in California: a mobile heritage of hydraulic mining debris
chapter Visual essay 1|12 pages
Extraction old and new: Toxic legacies of mining the desert in southwestern Africa
chapter 2|15 pages
Of blaes and bings: the (non)toxic heritage of the West Lothian oil shale industry
chapter 3|12 pages
When Toxic Heritage is Forever: Confronting PFAS Contamination and Toxicity as Lived Experience
part Section 2|1 pages
Introduction: The Politics of Toxic Heritage
chapter 5|12 pages
Heritage-Led Regeneration and the Sanitisation of Memory in the Lower Swansea Valley
chapter Case Study 1|4 pages
Ghost Wrecks of the Anthropocene: An Enduring Toxic Legacy of the Pacific War
chapter 6|13 pages
Military Legacies and Indigenous Heritage in Canada's Newest National Park Reserve
chapter Case study 3|4 pages
Sticky, Stinky, Squalid: The Toxic Leachate of Households' Waste in an Area of Urban Decay in Tehran (Iran)
part Section 3|2 pages
Introduction: Affected Communities, Activism, and Agency
chapter Case study 4|5 pages
Public Memory of Toxic Displacement: Heavy Metal Contamination and Superfund Remediation in Federally Assisted Housing Communities
chapter Visual Essay 2|8 pages
Translating and transforming toxicity: Moving between ethnography and graphic art
chapter 11|14 pages
Unwanted Legacy and Memory of the Milieu: Toxic Materials, Remediation, Habituation (Estarreja, Portugal)
part Section 4|2 pages
Introduction: Narratives of Toxic Heritage
chapter Case study 5|5 pages
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
chapter 14|17 pages
Toxic City: Industrial Residues, the Body and Community Activism as Heritage Practice in Glasgow
part Section 5|2 pages
Introduction: Approaches and Interventions