ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Soil, Water, Image Remediation: Chemical War and U.S. Epistemic Investments in Agent Orange Environmental Science After Vietnam, 1980-2005

• In Event: Forensic Science in Transtemporal Perspective

English Abstract

In the 1980s, veterans of the US War in Vietnam launched a class-action lawsuit against corporate producers of Agent Orange, which was settled for $180 million without conceding a link between Agent Orange and ill health outcomes. In the following years, the social and ecological aftermaths of war in southeast Asia spurred multi-sited movements for justice across peoples and places affected by US chemical war. During the 1980s, Vietnamese medical experts expanded health studies of dioxins, while some of these experts also collaborated with US, Canadian, and other western scientists to expand environmental scientific studies of Agent Orange exposures at larger scales. The Vietnamese 10-80 Committee and Hatfield Consultants collaboration culminated in the 1990s in the theorization of “dioxin hot spots” to denote scientifically identified heavily altered ecologies of military chemical exposures. Even with this knowledge and proliferating health sciences research, when the Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) filed a lawsuit in the US against over thirty corporate producers of Agent Orange, it was still rejected by US courts. This paper considers the US epistemic investments in the developing environmental scientific research as a mode of political remediation advanced by courts, political elites, and corporate media. In the context of bolstered neoliberal deregulation, the privatization of health, and the rhetoric of globalization, I argue that the US state mobilized the universalization of environmental crises as it converged with Agent Orange to flatten the colonial and imperial violence of chemical war histories and its racialized and gendered continuities.

Author

• Rohini Patel, McMaster University