This paper engages the relationship between toxic geographies and settler colonialism. By bringing to light larger structures and histories that underpin the settler colonial project, I examine a series of toxic encounters and consider the racialised hegemonic narratives that enable the production toxicity. Among these is a methylmercury contamination in Northern Ontario, just upstream from Grassy Narrows First Nation, and a cluster of toxic conversations that bled through social media in the wake of the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22‐year‐old Cree man in Saskatchewan, Canada. I argue that examining the normative ideologies, settler narratives, and socio‐political structures that are involved in the production of toxicity provides valuable insight into the diffuse and relational colonial logics that define the lives that are privileged as the standard, and those that fall outside the regulatory category of the Human, and as a result, are subject to elimination.

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This study, set in the context of a group of recycling cooperatives in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil, is about the relationship between emotional geographies and notions of empowerment. Paying attention to the ways that emotional expressions of empowerment deconstruct and subvert oppressive relations of power, while simultaneously reproducing and obscuring these same oppressive hegemons, we ask: what emotions are collectively felt by those who ascribe to the movement? And more importantly, what do these collective emotions do? How do emotions align individuals with particular collective values, and how do these emotions work in relation to systems of domination? Due to the cooperatives' location within Brazilian hegemonic systems of social domination, we argue that viewing empowerment as an emotion 'I feel empowered' rather than something one is or one achieves 'I am empowered' offers the space to consider the necessarily paradoxical nature of empowerment.

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