Radical Inspections: Of Sensorium as Toxic Proposition

This project explores the processes that compelled an Ecuadorian court in 2011 to find Chevron liable for $9 billion, and compelled the US District Court in 2014 and Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2018 to delegitimize the Ecuador ruling for being procured through fraud.

Working against Chevron’s corruption worlding, this talk offers a glimpse into the litigation in Ecuador that found Chevron culpable. It suggests that the Ecuador litigation (despite its flaws) serves as an instructive judicial assembly for reckoning near-intractable contamination disputes. By subsuming complex scientific evidence within experiential truths, unique evidentiary procedures in Ecuador triggered a process for distributing responsibility under the law. Given multiplying socio-ecological harms, this project hazards a method for thinking challenging environmental controversies and making sense of formidable corporate challenges.

Suzana Sawyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis. She earned her undergraduate degree from University of California, Berkeley and PhD from Stanford University. Her work has focused on conflicts surrounding resource extraction (Crude Chronicles [2004], Politics of Resource Extraction [2012]).

Suzana’s forthcoming book, The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press 2022), uses chemistry, and especially a notion of valence, as a method-device for thinking legal, scientific, and corporate relations in a twenty-five-year legal saga enfolding three litigations issuing from environmental contamination in Ecuador.