An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor’s narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.

There is a pervasive sense of incessant acceleration in the academic world. This book puts the temporal ordering of academic life under the microscope, and showcases the means of yielding a better understanding of how time and temporality act both as instruments of power and vulnerability within the academic space.

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.

Both academic and popular representations of globalization, critical or celebratory, have tended to conceptualize it primarily in spatial terms, rather than simultaneously temporal ones. However, time, in both its ideational and material dimensions, has played an important role in mediating and shaping the directions, courses, and outcomes of globalization. Focusing on the intersection of time and globalization, this book aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue between the (largely separated) respective literatures on each of these themes. This dialogue will be of both theoretical and empirical significance, since many urgent issues of contemporary human affairs—from large epochal problems such as climate change, to everyday struggles with the dynamics of social acceleration—involve a complex interplay between temporality and globalization. A critical understanding of the relationship between time and globalization will not only facilitate innovative thinking about globalization; it will also foster our imagination of alternatives that may lead to more socially just and sustainable futures. This innovative collection illustrates the theoretical benefits of bridging time with globalization and also exemplifies the methodological strengths of engaging in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship to better understand the changing economic, social, political, cultural and ecological dynamics in this globalizing world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

What is the alt-right? What do they believe, and how did they take center stage in the American social and political consciousness? Historian Alexandra Minna Stern excavates the alt-right memes that have erupted online and digs to the root of the far right’s motivations: their deep-seated fear of an oncoming “white genocide” that can only be remedied through aggressive action to reclaim white power. The alt-right has expanded significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes: racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted—endangering American democracy and society as a whole. When asked to address the Proud Boys and growing far right violence, President Trump directed the group to “stand back and stand by;” and just two weeks before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, a white supremacist mob breached the US Capitol—earning praise from the Proud Boys leader amongst threats of future violence. In order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness and threatens American democracy, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right. Through careful analysis, Stern brings awareness to the underlying concepts that guide the alt-right and its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, and transphobia. She explains the key ideas of “red-pilling,” strategic trolling, gender essentialism, and the alt-right’s ultimate fantasy: a future where minorities have been “cleansed” from the body politic and a white ethnostate is established in the United States. By unearthing the hidden mechanisms that power white nationalism, Stern reveals just how pervasive the far right truly is.

In Toxic Matters, Monica Seger considers two Italian environmental disasters: an isolated factory explosion in Seveso, just north of Milan, in 1976 and the ongoing daily toxic emissions from the Ilva steelworks in the Apulian city of Taranto. Both have exposed residents to high concentrations of the persistent organic pollutant known as dioxin. Although different in terms of geography and temporality, Seveso and Taranto are deeply united by this nearly imperceptible substance, and by the representational complexities it poses. They are also united by creative narrative expressions, in literary, cinematic, and other forms, that push back against dominant contexts and representations perpetuated by state and industrial actors. Seger traces a dialogue between Seveso and Taranto, exploring an interplay between bodies, soil, industrial emissions, and the wealth of dynamic particulate matter that passes in between. At the same time, she emphasizes the crucial function of narrative expression for making sense of this modern-day reality and for shifting existing power dynamics as exposed communities exercise their voices. While Toxic Matters, is grounded in Italian cases and texts, it looks outward to the pressing questions of toxicity, embodiment, and storytelling faced by communities worldwide.

Timescapes of Modernity explores the relationship between time and environmental and socio-cultural concerns. Using examples such as the BSE crisis, the Sea Empress oil pollution and the Chernobyl radiation Barbara Adam argues that environmental hazards are inescapably tied to the successes of the industrial way of life. Global markets and economic growth; large-scale production of food; the speed of transport and communication; the 24 hour society and even democratic politics are among the invisible hazards we face. With this unique 'timescape' perspective the author dislodges assumptions about environmental change, enables a rethinking of environmental problems and provides the potential for new strategies to deal with environmental hazards.