A dialogic approach to toxic disasters: Agent orange in a luoi valley

Abstract

In the 2000s, a scientific research by a Canadian environmental consulting firm triggered a public health campaign in A Luoi Valley of Central Vietnam. It informed its inhabitants — for the first time — about the risks and harms associated with chemical defoliant “Agent Orange” and its toxic contaminant dioxin sprayed during the Second Indochina War (19611975). In this article, instead of focusing on the political identity formed by such knowledge (“biosocial” approach), I explore how the risk of toxic substance is experienced by the inhabitants in dialogic encounters vis-à-vis various environmental signs as well as imaginary and real interlocutors.