Toxic Heritage

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.

Foreword; Introduction: Toxic Heritage: An Introduction. Section 1: Introduction - Section 1 "Framing Toxicity": Chapter 1: Toxic legacies of slickens in California: a mobile heritage of hydraulic mining debris; Visual Essay 1: Visual Essay: Extraction old and new: toxic legacies of mining the desert in southwestern Africa; Chapter 2: Of blaes and bings: the (non)toxic heritage of the West Lothian oil shale industry; Chapter 3: When Toxic Heritage is Forever: Confronting PFAS Contamination and Toxicity as Lived Experience; Chapter 4: Plasticity and Time: Using the Stress-Strain Curve as a Framework for Investigating the Wicked Problems of Marine Pollution and Climate Change. Section 2: Introduction - Section 2 "The Politics of Toxic Heritage": Chapter 5: Heritage-led Regeneration and the Sanitisation of Memory in the Lower Swansea Valley; Case Study 1: Ghost Wrecks of the Anthropocene: An Enduring Toxic Legacy of the Pacific War; Chapter 6: Military Legacies and Indigenous Heritage in Canada’s Newest National Park Reserve; Case Study 2: Trash Fires as Toxic Heritage in Palestine; Chapter 7: Politics of Mining: Toxic Heritage in the Atacama Desert; Case Study 3: Sticky, Stinky, Squalid: The toxic leachate of households’ waste in an area of urban decay in Tehran (Iran); Chapter 8: Toxic Landmarking and Technoprecarious Heritage in Ghana. Section 3: Section 3 Affected Communities, Activism, and Agency – Introduction: Chapter 9: Reluctant Returns: Repatriating a Poisoned Past; Case Study 4: Public Memory of Toxic Displacement: Heavy Metal Contamination and Superfund Remediation in Federally Assisted Housing Communities; Visual Essay 2: Translating and Transforming Toxicity: Moving Between Ethnography and Graphic Art; Chapter 10: Preservation by demolition: Toxic heritage in contemporary China; Chapter 11: Unwanted Legacy and Memory of the Milieu: Toxic Materials, Remediation, Habituation (Estarreja, Portugal); Chapter 12: Environmental and Embodied Agro-toxic heritage in Rural Uruguay: From Recognition to Transition to Sustainability among Dairy Farmers. Section 4 Introduction - Section 4 "Narratives of Toxic Heritage": Chapter 13: Dirty Laundry: the Toxic Heritage of Dry Cleaning in Indianapolis, Indiana; Case Study 5: When Cleaning up the Battlefields from Time of War has Polluted Soils in Time of Peace: A Silent but Visible Toxic Legacy from the Great War; Chapter 14: Toxic City: Industrial Residues, the Body and Community Activism as Heritage Practice in Glasgow; Case Study 6: Rubber as (toxic) heritage: the Amazonian rubber case; Case Study 7: Three memory frameworks on Chernobyl; Chapter 15: The Toxic Anthracite: Toxic Heritage. Section 5: Introduction - Section 5 "Approaches and Interventions": Chapter 16: Environmental Justice Tours: Transformative Narratives of Struggle, Solidarity and Activism; Visual Essay 3: Getting the Lead Out, One Community at a Time; Case Study 8: Climate Museum UK: Practices in Response to the Traumasphere; Chapter 17: Toxic Heritage and Reparations: Activating Memory for Climate Justice; Case Study 9: Case Study: From Leftovers To Takeover: Latent Insurgency Amidst the System’s Remnants; Visual Essay 4: Taking care of nuclear waste; Chapter 18: Toxic and Wasted: Artists Thinking About How to Engage With Material Futures; Conclusion: Why Toxic Heritage Matters.