Michitake Aso

“After Agent Orange” examines how Vietnamese physicians and scientists confronted warfare’s toxic legacies. These “activist experts” combined medical care, scientific research, and political engagement to address the health and environmental impacts of TCDD dioxin, a contaminant of Agent Orange. Drawing on oral histories and archives in Vietnam, the United States, and Europe, this project traces how key actors built transnational networks that advanced knowledge about dioxin exposure by pressing claims for victims’ rights and ecological justice. For Ton That Tung, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phượng, and others, political engagement enabled medical care and scientific research; for example, founding a Peace Village for disabled children facilitated research into their families’ exposure histories. Tensions between and within Washington and Hanoi made navigating the science and politics of dioxin difficult, as expert independence could serve or unsettle state agendas. Yet, by building transnational networks to press their claims domestically and internationally, activist experts contributed to emerging understandings of dioxin. In other words, debates over responsibility in the aftermath of the Vietnam War shaped knowledge creation, which in turn influenced postwar reconciliation. Foregrounding this process clarifies the politics of knowledge production in the pursuit of justice.

This dissertation examines the social and environmental consequences of the introduction of rubber into the political economy of French colonial Vietnam. Colonialism, the environment, and scientific knowledge played key roles in the emergence of the rubber industry during the twentieth century. This dissertation analyzes the business of rubber, workers’ experiences of plantation life, and the region’s natural and social landscapes in order to discuss worker health and environmental transformations. Rubber plantations were not only places of brutal working conditions, but also experimental sites where knowledge was generated, tested, and implemented and where conceptions of human rights were debated and reworked, often violently.