Section 2 – The Politics of Toxic Heritage

The activities and questions in this section provide an opportunity to consider issues of the politics of toxic heritage including policy, stakeholders, and the fields of power in which the toxic heritage operates at local, regional, national, and global scales. As the Section 2 introduction in the Toxic Heritage edited volume notes, “Heritage is always entangled with notions of value, often involving conflicting and contested frameworks of meaning. For toxic heritage, this arena of contestation and meaning-making is particularly fraught because of the implications of culpability and accountability for past polluters, as well as the opportunities for resistance, advocacy, and other political actions in which extractivism is named and challenged. The evidence presented in this section challenges traditional heritage narratives that often sidestep accountability through othering.”