by Elizabeth Hameeteman
What does it mean to live with the material traces of past decisions? How do societies deal with infrastructures that were once celebrated as progress but now understood as sources of harm? And how can teaching create space to learn about toxic pasts while documenting and questioning them together?
These questions shaped the block seminar Toxic Legacies: Waste, Water, and Infrastructures of Containment, which I held during the Winter Semester 2025/2026. At the center of the seminar was a shared experiment: creating a collaborative digital archive, built collectively by students during the course.
From the start, the archive functioned as more than a final output. It structured how the seminar unfolded. Students created entries week by week instead of writing one final paper, responding to themes discussed in class and connecting them to places, materials, and experiences that felt relevant.
The result is Toxic Legacies: a collection of short texts, annotated maps, photo essays, and speculative pieces.
Some entries focus on well-known contaminated sites. Others look at everyday forms of pollution that often go unnoticed. Some are analytical, others personal or reflective. Together, they show different ways of encountering and making sense of toxic legacies.
Students shaped the archive through their own choices. Each entry involved decisions about what to focus on, how to tell the story, and which perspective to take.
What counts as a “toxic site”? Whose experiences matter? How do small, local observations connect to larger systems? Such questions guided the work throughout.
A few examples from the archive include:
- Diagnosis “Bitterfeld” looks at one of Germany’s most polluted industrial regions and traces how mining, power plants, and chemical production reshaped the landscape—and how these histories still matter today.
- Toxic Geography of the Tagus maps pollution along the Tagus River, placing industrial sites next to personal swimming spots. The results shows how everyday life and polluted environments exist side by side.
- Thoughts awakened by ‘Seeing Like a State’ takes a more personal approach, reflecting on landscape architecture and planning through the experience of growing up with a parent working in this field.
Across the archive, different scales come together. A landfill appears next to a global waste trade route. A personal memory sits alongside infrastructure. A speculative idea responds to a historical project.
These connections were not planned in advance, emerging rather through the students’ work. The seminar provided the space for this to happen. Over six sessions, we moved from key concepts to concrete examples and finally to questions of responsibility and repair.
Early on, we worked with concepts like slow violence, interscalar harm, and toxic coloniality to better understand why environmental harm is often hard to see and unevenly distributed.
Later sessions focused more closely on infrastructures and systems. We looked at dams and large-scale water projects and how their impacts continue long after construction. We discussed hazardous waste, Cold War waste trade, and how toxicity is often managed through distance and invisibility.

A guest lecture by Sophie Lange brought in the example of German-German waste management in the 1980s and raised questions about who gets to shape conversations about pollution and remediation. Conversations around recycling and the circular economy added another layer, especially around how “green” solutions are framed.
All of this fed directly into the archive. Rather than simply applying ideas from the readings, students tested, adapted, and sometimes challenged these ideas in their own entries.
The archive became a space where theory and lived experience met.
This also shaped how toxicity was understood. Rather than seeing it as a purely technical issue, the seminar approached it as something that grows out of decisions—about infrastructure, policy, and expertise. Harm often unfolds slowly and unevenly. It is not always visible. It remains in landscapes and waterways, but also in bodies, memories, and records.
In the final session, we turned to questions of responsibility and repair. What happens when full clean-up is not possible? What does care look like in damaged environments? And what role can documentation play in these situations? The archive does not offer one answer. Instead, it brings together different ways of looking at these questions.
For students, the archive means that the work continues beyond the seminar. Entries remain accessible and can be revisited or built on. For me as an instructor, the project opened up a way of working that connects teaching, research, and public engagement. And for readers, the archive offers a glimpse into how toxic legacies shape everyday environments.
In the end, the seminar and the archive return to a simple question:
What does it mean to live with the traces of past decisions—and how might looking more closely change how those legacies are understood?
Dr. Elizabeth Hameeteman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department for the History of Technology at TU Berlin, whose research focuses on water, infrastructure, and development, with particular attention to desalination and the environmental legacies of postwar modernization.
Images:
Image 1: Toxic Legacies.
Image 2: Maia Merve Heerdegen, Rodolfo Cardoso Matos, and Lina Michalik.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Redaktion (8. Mai 2026). Living with Toxic Legacies. TGTUBlog. Abgerufen am 16. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/166z0
