Part of my role as Head of Department is to raise my head
above the parapet and receive whatever is flying about. I have got two such
emails launched by the Black Lives Matter movement. The first was an account of
the experiences of one of my staff members as a young black person in the UK.
The second was an email exchange between some students (notably Aatika Adam
from our Chemical and Biological Engineering Department) and their department
about their experiences studying in a department predominantly populated by
non-BAME staff; as one of their points, they addressed the issue of the
decolonisation of the curriculum.
I teach first year Thermodynamics, which is mostly
equations, systems and control volumes. So my first thought was that
Thermodynamics has not been a function of the people that created it. My
beloved equations are independent of context. So, prompted by the emails, I
started thinking about this. It suddenly struck me that while thermodynamics is
independent of context, energy is a far more political, context and
historically driven subject. At dinner that night I mentioned this “revelation”
to my daughter who is studying Geography at university. She
was somewhat taken aback by this. She's worked with me to create this and writes
in italics.
It is, of course, important to note that even thermodynamics, composed of numbers, was not
created in a cultural vacuum. This is clear when looking at pictures of the
fathers of the field, which is a collection of various white men with beards.
The historical context of these discoveries is necessary to know why it was
only these men who were able to succeed. As a geographer, I was astounded that
even modern-day engineering academics, with their years of learning, saw their
work as apolitical, acultural. To me, engineering exists to solve real-world
issues, and real-world issues are fraught with real-world problems. These
problems are not just technical difficulties, but issues of race, class, and
gender.
The example we
discussed was the issue of bringing amenities to slum settlements in developing
countries. An engineer might be guilty of approaching this as an almost wholly
technical issue. However, this approach neglects the needs and wants of the
people who may use the new facilities. We must ask ourselves: who has access to
the necessary amenities, and who does not? Why? The answers to these questions
lie in an understanding that slums are not apolitical, and their existence is
founded on cultural, historical, and postcolonial contexts.
On the other hand, the equations that one would solve to
specify, say, the scale of a solar panel to provide hot water for a house are
independent of the context. This is an equation based on the amount of hot
water needed per person, the solar irradiance and the efficiency of the
collector. The available technology, and we do think in terms of appropriate
technologies, will dictate how to install the system. As engineers, we do not
think why historically the family may not have hot water. We would be unaware
that there could be another family down the road who has more hot water than
they need and of the histories that made this so. We see the lack of hot water
as a technical problem to be solved. We have the equations and the catalogues
to do this. As educators, we could claim that we don’t have the room in the
timetable to look at geopolitical issues, as we teach engineering.
As educators, I would
say that you have a duty to look at geopolitical issues! If people are not
aware of the contexts in which they work, they will not understand the unique
struggles of each area or group of people. This translates not just to their
work in, say, the solar panel industry, but how they relate to the people they
work with, and their engagement with cultural issues. As we have seen with the
Black Lives Matter movement, when we fail to take into account social and
historical contexts, we fail to accept that people do not come from an equal
standing. This means that meaningful change doesn’t happen.
In the case of your
example of solar panels, it is worth considering who is able to afford the
solar panels, and what the barriers might be to accessing them. For example,
some government schemes to install solar panels are only available to people
who own their own home. This means that people who live in rented or
council-owned accommodation may be unable to benefit from these schemes. It is
therefore important to note that black people are over-represented in social
housing[2];
if we consider why this may be while ignoring its historical and cultural
context, then we risk entrenching the current situation.
And yet, to first order, our aim as engineers is to make
things better. We may think that increased efficiencies of aircraft will reduce
pollution, but do the people who live in the destinations for the increase in
tourists actually benefit from this? Possibly in terms of reduction in rise in
sea levels, but if they lose the beach where they fish from to people who fly
in for their holidays, then the improvement in the aircraft is actually to
their detriment. An understanding of why this can happen[3]
is independent of creating a better turbine blade. But without any knowledge of
the history of “Holiday destinations”, often one of their colonial past, it is
easy to think of air travel as a purely good thing, if we could only make it
emission free…
This is actually a
good point, as climate change is known to disproportionately impact
marginalised communities, especially women of colour[4].
The aim of engineers is to make things better, of course, but too many
“improvements” have been made that shun the voices of, and actively harm,
marginalised individuals. It is vital to critically examine for whom things
will be improved.
So I still think that the beautiful equations and agnostic
perceptions of the laws of thermodynamics are freestanding and exciting and I
want to communicate them to anyone who'll listen (and even those who won't!). But their applications, and especially
their uses in systems, are dependent on their context. The bearded professors
of the 19th century ignored the reasons behind the poverty around them, but we
should be aware of the histories of the places where our engineering touches.
As engineers, we need to understand that when we aim to change the world, we
should learn to understand it and its real history. The emails that catalysed
my original thoughts stated that we should 'decolonise the curriculum'. My
initial reaction that thermodynamics was not a candidate for this showed me the
importance of context and looking at the examples of other societies and
disciplines.
References
[1] Thanks to Dr R Wooley for this graphic
[3] Klein, N, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, 2007
[4] Fatma Denton (2002) Climate change vulnerability,
impacts, and adaptation: Why does gender matter?, Gender & Development,
10:2, 10-20, DOI: 10.1080/13552070215903
Stephen Beck is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Sheffield where he is head of the department of Multidisciplinary Engineering Education.
Sarah Beck is a final year Geography student at the University of Cambridge.
