One Word of Heart is Worth Three of Talent: Professional Communication Strategies in a Vietnamese Nonprofit Organization

ABSTRACT

This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for “good” technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• globalization
• intercultural communication
• international communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Like much of the scientific and military discourse on Agent Orange, sources vary and often conflict regarding the exact quantities of defoliant sprayed, the areas sprayed, and the duration soldiers were likely exposed. That said, Lewy (1978) based his figures on the Military Assistant Command, Vietnam (MACV) history, which is one of the better sources available.

2. For a fairly thorough explication of the court records and final settlement amounts, see Peter Sill’s (2014) Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange. The strength of the book is his access to trial documents, transcripts, and files, many of which have been lost to history and never digitized or archived. However, his selected bibliography includes only 24 works, with the most recent works published in 1993 before much of the recent and best scholarship on Agent Orange was written. For a complete decision, see Judge Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, In re “Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation,” March 10, 2005, available at http://www.ffrd.org/AO/10)03)05)agentorange.pdf.

3. In the 1960s, Congress was certainly aware of Agent Orange, but the public controversy about AO exposure had not yet begun, and so most texts about AO were technical memorandums like that composed by Richard A. Hensen in August of 1965, describing the “Physical Properties of Normal Butyl Esters of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T and Orange.” There were also science and policy legislative assessment reports. Such reports were delivered to the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development of the Committee on Science and Astronautics in the U.S. House of Representatives, 91st Congress, 1969. In later decades, the congressional corpus changed substantially, and included reports to the Comptroller General on the costs of covering negative health effects related to AO (1978). By the 1980s, and at the height of the scientific controversy, the congressional corpus included special reports specific to AO delivered to the Committee on Veterans Affairs, hearings, and the specific testimony of Admiral Zumwalt, an important character in the narrative of AO (2000), as he and his son, who were high-ranking officials in the U.S. military, died of exposure-related disease. There are also health and science briefings by Dr. Alvin Young (2009) much of which were codified in his book The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange, but this text should be read skeptically, given Dr. Young's collaboration with Monsanto and Dow Chemical Corporations (see “Alvin A. Young Collection on Agent Orange Scope and Content,” 2018). By the 1990s and 2000s, most of the texts reflect testimony gathered in hearings that resulted in bills and appropriation reports.

4. The Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute are two nonprofit organizations that have tirelessly advocated on issues related to AO (The Agent Orange in Vietnam program, n.d.).

5. There are hundreds of studies looking at various effects of dioxin on human and animal health. The best meta-analysis of these studies on human health was conducted by Anh Duc Ngo and colleagues (2006), “Association between Agent Orange and Birth Defects: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”. Additionally, see Michael Gough’s (2002) “The Political Science of Agent Orange and Dioxin.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Beth Hopton

Dr. Sarah Beth Hopton is an associate professor of technical & professional writing at Appalachian State University. Her scholarship focuses on technical communication, social justice and the environment and can be found in Technical Communication, Communication Design Quarterly, connexions, Kairos. Her creative nonfiction books are published with Indiana University Press, and she is a nonfiction editor with Cold Mountain Review.

Rebecca Walton

Dr. Rebecca Walton is an associate professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Utah State University. Her research interests include social justice, human rights, and qualitative methods for cross-cultural research. Primarily a field researcher, she has collaborated with organizations such as the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, and World Vision to conduct research in countries including Uganda, Kyrgyzsan, and Bolivia. Her work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and other journals and edited collections.