| The saga of the Khian Sea, still very much untold and largely missing from the arena of scholarship, is more than a simple account of a series of struggles over waste disposal at home and abroad. This dissertation seeks to establish that the phenomenon of toxic waste cannot be understood independently of material practices and social relations comprising the dynamics of world historical capitalism, and that it is only through an investigation of those practices and relations that we can properly ground our concepts of toxic waste and the struggles against injustices cohering around it. As I seek to address this important topic, my approach and basic contentions will be implicit in the dissertation's title: namely, that a world-systems perspective, with its espousal of an historical materialist version of relational dialectics, offers a fruitful opportunity to surmount fragmented, static conceptualizations of our long-term large-scale, socio-ecological predicaments and to more fully understand them so that we can better challenge them and related forms socio-ecological injustice. |
