Abstract
I build upon feminist arguments for situated knowledge and pragmatist arguments for experimental inquiry to articulate and argue for an approach that I refer to as situated communities. This approach seeks to generate effective and ethical scientific research practices by asking that researchers focus on communities in their complex environment as subjects of study instead of relying primarily on clinical trials and laboratory research. Communities should be recognized as situated epistemic agents and as changing, evolving centers of life. Doing so requires that these communities are understood in their materiality through bodies that are aged, gendered, abled/disabled, raced, classed, colonized, bordered, materially advantaged and disadvantaged, engaged in particular daily practices within a complex environment.
To illustrate my argument I analyze the effects of Agent Orange on communities in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam and the accompanying research on Agent Orange. I argue that when studied through the situated communities approach instead of in the isolation of the laboratory, it becomes much more obvious why Agent Orange can cause the congenital anomalies, cancers, and other diseases the Vietnamese claim it does. I focus especially on women in this region because they carry the largest social burden of the effects of Agent Orange due to their role in agriculture, housework, childbearing, breastfeeding, and caring for children and adults affected by Agent Orange.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Like many people in the U.S. who heard about Agent Orange, my knowledge came primarily from the 1978 lawsuit, settled in 1984, by U.S. Vietnam veterans against the manufacturers of Agent Orange. Until recently the claims by the U.S. government and the chemical manufacturers dominated the public and scientific opinions on the effects of Agent Orange.
- 3.
Code also works to drive this point home in Ecological Thinking. This is especially evident in her discussion of the knowledge Rachel Carson generated from turning to the world for her knowledge instead of to reports from laboratory testing.
- 4.
Among other feminists that have influenced the direction of situated knowledge arguments are Chela Sandoval (2000), Sarah Hoagland (2001), and Chandra Mohanty (2003). In this paper I don’t take up their work on situated knowledges because I am focusing on feminists whose work has most directly influenced discussions in feminist philosophy of science. In my project, Actions Which Change the Face of the World, I develop and utilize a broader range of work in feminist epistemology to address the situated nature of knowledge.
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Arguments that seek to create change in science frequently are cast as reactionary and designed to denigrate science when their actual goal is to improve how science is practiced. For example, feminist science studies was ‘feminist critiques of science,’ but ‘critique’ was viewed by mainstream science studies, scientists, and popular press as anti-science even though these early analyses were largely generated by female scientists whose goal was to develop better scientific knowledge, not to dismantle science.
- 10.
I consider implications of the situated communities approach in my manuscript Actions Which Change the Face of the World. Among these are whether the situated communities approach is time consuming and therefore burdensome, issues of epistemic authority, the limits and extent of our knowledge, the ethical and epistemic consequences entailed with speaking for, with and to marginalized groups, issues of epistemic honesty and humility, the challenges of pluralism, and structural constraints with funding more situated projects.
- 11.
Agent Orange was not the most toxic of these chemical defoliants sprayed in Vietnam, Agent Purple was. However, Agent Orange is the most referenced of these and of the most concern because it was the most heavily sprayed defoliant through aerial and hand spraying as well as the highest source of contamination through leakage in and around former U.S. military bases, areas that are in immediate proximity of Vietnamese hamlets. Data collected in 2003 increases the U.S. government’s post-war estimate defoliant spraying by seven million liters (Stellman et al. 2003, 1) and contamination by dioxin from an estimate of less than 170 kg to greater than 600 kg (Dwernychuk et al. 2005, 998). This does not include containers leaks at U.S. bases, which are the location of the most heavily contaminated dioxin sites in Vietnam and the rest of the world.
- 12.
This sentiment is echoed by an article in Nature: ‘In 1961, for the first time in the history of mankind, large-scale chemical warfare was started in South Vietnam by the Kennedy Administration’ (1982, 114).
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- 14.
See the court documents Memorandum, Order and Judgment: Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation, 10/3/2005 and the epilogue to this paper.
- 15.
So, though women’s bodies accumulate more dioxin because of their higher body fat (dioxin is lipophilic, i.e. accumulates in fat), they also lose the dioxin from breastfeeding.
- 16.
Dioxin is hydrophobic so it rests on top of the water. Thus people working on or in the water easily come in contact with it.
- 17.
There certainly are other reasons for this high rate, but the director of the hospital was clear that selective abortion because of congenital anomalies was an important contributor to their high abortion rate.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science FounÂdaÂtion under Grant No. 0541512. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Thank you to Heidi Grasswick, the reviewers of this volume, and the ‘Writing Group,’ Tammy Proctor and Molly Wood, for their invaluable criticism.
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McHugh, N.A. (2011). More Than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and Agent Orange in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam. In: Grasswick, H. (eds) Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6835-5_9
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