Cobalt and decolonisation
‘Decolonisation’: a vague term
There is a growing movement to ‘decolonise’ curriculums in Higher Education, and increasing heat in the reporting of this movement in the UK press - both for and against it.
Decolonisation means something quite concrete in the politics of total regime change (e.g. the end of British rule in India), but is a hard-to-define term in a curriculum context. Some people see it as being about contemporary social justice, and discuss problems like ethnicity awarding gaps as decolonisation. Others see it as relating to historical events, and emphasise themes like the long-overlooked work of Arabic scholars in early investigations into the chemical world.
So the word ‘decolonise’ embraces quite different ideas, but is used as though it doesn’t: the word is vague. Some of the difficulty of talking about decolonisation is to do with using this vague language which moves the conversation away from the concrete, specific details of a curriculum (e.g. the composition of a reading list, the format of an assessment task). The problem seems particularly acute in the sciences, where personal identity is often not a point of discussion: it doesn’t matter to a molecule whether it was discovered by an old white man, so what exactly does it mean to decolonise the study of metal complexes?
Cobalt
So I’d like to talk specifics. I want to talk about how a decolonisation lens on content in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum could improve the education my students receive. To do this, I want to focus on how this could be done for element twenty-seven: cobalt. What would that look like?
The agenda here is not to say that this is the way it should be done, but to explore specific ways decolonisation might be realised in the context of a chemistry degree. I want to explore the issue of assessment in particular, which seems especially hard to reconcile with aspects of the current curriculum.
Current curriculum context
Cobalt is initially presented mostly as a representative of the late 3d metals. A first year chemist might be expected to solve problems relating to the spin-only magnetic moments of octahedral and tetrahedral complexes of Co(II) and Co(III), including some cruelly-borderline cases like the spin state of [Co(NH3)6]2+.
More advanced theoretical topics might explore cobalt’s organometallic chemistry, particularly in hydroformylation catalysis and the Pauson-Khand reaction (which raises the fun handwriting problem of distinguishing Co from CO). The use of cobalt oxide matrices in lithium ion batteries is of enormous commercial significance and is often included in a chemistry degree, but the use of cobalt in alloys like steels is rarely covered despite its fundamental importance to modern society (why is this?). Cobalt’s use in particular examples of templated macrocycle formation is often a chance to discuss the fundamental energetics of metal-ligand bonding, and its role within proteins like B12 is a critical part of human biochemistry.
A student’s theoretical exposure to cobalt chemistry is typically complemented by lab practicals. These might relate to the specific properties of cobalt compounds (colour, magnetic properties), specific lab-compatible syntheses (readily accessible hydrides, air-sensitive organometallics), or incidental convenient features such as a FCC cell for a diffraction practical.
So cobalt is in the curriculum: we talk about cobalt a lot. But we also deploy theory and problem solving assessment strategies to portray cobalt as just another case of the general behaviour of electrons in d-orbitals. Cobalt is not a topic; it is an example.
Current industrial context
How is cobalt perceived outside the curriculum? What role does it play in modern society? Annual production of cobalt is around 170,000 metric tonnes, and currently (Nov2022) trades on the commodities market at 52,000 USD/MT. A 2006 report lists the biggest uses of cobalt as batteries (22%), superalloys (22%), catalysts (11%) and hard alloys (9%).
Cobalt ores are only deposited near the surface of the earth’s crust under very specific geological conditions. This means that viable cobalt mines are located in very small areas of the world. While it doesn’t have a complete monopoly on cobalt, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) produced 70% of the world’s 2019 output. To illustrate the dominance of the DRC, the next-largest producer - Russia - produced only 4% of global cobalt.
So we need cobalt and it’s mostly mined in the DRC. What’s the problem? The problem is how cobalt is mined.
Mining in the DRC
The importance of mining to the economy of the DRC is arguably an imperial legacy. The infrastructure and knowledge left by colonisers was developed with the explicit aim of extracting the mineral wealth of colonies; the Congo-Ocean Railway, for example, was constructed using forced labour and ferried African resources to Europe-bound ships. Today the DRC mining sector is mostly (~75%) carried out by large mining firms, with the remaining output coming from ‘artisanal’ mines operating on a much smaller scale.
Artisanal mine tunnels are frequently constructed poorly, and both tunnel mines and open mines (where a huge pit is excavated) typically employ children; Al Jazeera News describes the DRC as the ‘Wild West of mining’. A Guardian report describes exploitative labour practices and wages of 30p/h. The larger mining firms seem to run secretive operations, but ABC News describes beatings as commonplace and deaths as going unreported.
The DRC is - under international pressure - slowly beginning to develop regulation around some of these practices, but the fundamental issue operates at a scale difficult for any one nation to manage. The world needs enormous amounts of cobalt, and mining is being done in ways which maximise economic efficiency at the cost of working conditions.
Yet regulation at the point of purchase seems difficult to develop because ‘blood cobalt’ is combined with ethically-mined ores during shipping and refinement. If you buy a block of cobalt, it’s very hard to know where it’s come from. It may even be that half is from the DRC and half from Cuba.
Decolonising cobalt: possible curriculum actions
My first publication was in group 9 metals. I have been housemates with people developing battery matrices. I have run lab practicals on the synthesis of Co(II) and Co(I) complexes. I have done lecture demonstrations of colour changes in transition metal complexes of cobalt. I knew nothing about the human rights abuses in cobalt mining until 2021. This was news to me, a lecturer in inorganic chemistry.
So the obvious curriculum decision would be to mention that cobalt mining is often conducted under horrifying conditions. Students could hear this from their lecturers, they could read this in their lab manuals. This is a specific and easy way to incorporate a broader view of cobalt, and could be done unilaterally: you could do this today if you’re teaching cobalt chemistry.
We could also think about the use of cobalt in lab practicals and undergraduate research projects. Transparently sourcing ethically-mined cobalt might be one way to change current practice (I’m sure people are already buying cobalt like this, but being more public about it might be an easy thing to do). It might be that there are ways of avoiding the use of unnecessary cobalt in labs, but it might also be that there aren’t: cobalt is a unique element, and switching it out (for iron etc) may not be chemically realistic.
Assessing decolonised learning: problem solving
Mentioning cobalt mining is an easy-but-shallow way of acknowledging the problems inherited by modern chemists. Deeper engagement with the material requires careful thought about assessment. How do you get a student to think about something deeply? You give them marks for showing that they’ve thought about it deeply. How do you get a student to ignore a topic? Examine it superficially (or not at all).
But how do you assess thoughtful reflection on the social dimensions of mining an essential mineral? The classic format would be the essay, though creative alternatives are increasingly well-understood (infographics, speeches, debates, Chemistry World-style articles).
At heart, all of these assessment formats are rooted in academic traditions of critical thinking. There are arguments about what exactly critical thinking is, but here it probably centrally involves constructing arguments.
Can we afford to mine less cobalt when it is so useful in the green economy? What increase in the cobalt commodity price would be tolerable to ensure adequate human rights standards? These are huge questions, with aspects falling beyond the expertise of our current training; how would an undergraduate chemist begin to grapple with them rigorously? Are chemists able to argue in this format about these topics? The nature of assessment presents a real problem for the decolonisation agenda in this discipline, because decolonisation aligns much more closely with critical thinking than problem solving.
There are descriptive questions which might work if the learning outcomes are not aimed at critical thinking: “What viable alternatives to blood cobalt currently exist within the batteries market?” A chemist is likely better-able to navigate a question like this, and it might usefully advance a skills agenda (e.g. searching the primary literature).
Are there problems to solve about the human dimensions of cobalt mining? It’s interesting to consider whether the style of problem we routinely present in unseen exams are capable of embracing this subject matter (perhaps analytical questions about the composition of ores?). It’s hard for me to see what such a problem would look like in general, but I’d be glad to hear thoughts from others.
If this material is worth teaching, it’s worth assessing; no curriculum reform is credible unless it integrates teaching with assessment. There are great opportunities here to use decolonisation as a way to broaden the skills we develop in our students, which will require careful thought but could end up being very positive for the characteristics of graduate chemists.
Conclusion
Decolonisation is a difficult term to understand in a curriculum context, but cobalt provides a case where rich economies are currently extracting the mineral wealth of the DRC under conditions which are widely recognised as desperately exploitative. Looking at this closely in an undergraduate chemistry degree would, in my view, be a valuable part of a rounded education.
Cobalt mining seems to fit most conceptions of the ‘decolonisation’ brief (for example: it happens predominantly in the global south, uses economically-extractive technologies, and has desperately inequitable social outcomes) but also honours the disciplinary focus of a chemistry degree. It is therefore a plausible candidate for a topic to be considered in an agenda of decolonising a curriculum, and seems readily compatible with models such as Haxton’s KLAWES framework (poster 33 in ViCEPHEC22).
But constructing a decolonised cobalt sequence runs up against some difficult features of the existing curriculum. To put a broader view of cobalt in, you need to take something else out. If you wanted to incorporate critical thinking about the social context of element twenty-seven, you’d probably need to remove (some) problem solving assessment. The change in emphasis from scientific models (e.g. Ligand Field Theory) to something more like societal analysis (e.g. the economics of mining) is also a very awkward circle to square.
Wider Reflections
At a grander sweep, it’s possible to see the current construction of the curriculum as a somewhat colonial artefact. That we study Werner’s cobalt complexes rather than the deadly process of mining the starting material says something: it is a statement about the kinds of knowledge we feel are worth including in a course of study, and the kinds we think aren’t. No-one is denying that it’s a good thing to know how metal complexes behave, but it is interesting to think critically about what is excluded by the current curriculum.
I wonder if there is even a sense in which we have built our idea of ‘chemistry’ around the products of empire, rather than its starting materials. The powder we get in a glass vial is not something we think about in the full context of its extraction and manufacture. The thing you do in lab specs? That’s chemistry. The thing you do in a hard hat? That’s not. The “not all chemists wear white coats” ad campaign was memorable, but was it an accurate reflection of the curriculum? The manufacture of chemicals is a vital part of the discipline which has been neglected by curriculum design emphasising dryly-academic corners of the Angstrom-scale world.
So there should be a way of reconciling decolonisation with traditional conceptions of rigour, which has scope to excite conservative educators as well as progressive ones. This might defuse some of the Culture War media reporting of decolonisation, where the issue is only another chance to pick a side.
Decolonisation is a chance to improve the curriculum. We should take it.