Albin Sönnergren GripeDoctoral student

About me

I am a part-time upper secondary school teacher, part-time postgraduate student, conducting research at the intersection between history didactics and environment and sustainability education. My dissertation project, “Deep time, history and time for action: Teaching upper secondary school history in the Anthropocene”, is partly financed by the Bolin Centre for Climate research.

About my research

It is well established that history can help people to orient themselves temporally and to make sense of contemporary issues in ways that support their attitudes, opinions, and actions. The philosopher of history Jörn Rüsen, among others, has argued that the use of history in this way is especially pronounced in times of great change and crisis. Consequently, history teaching can support the development of several more general competencies and may help students deal with daunting societal challenges. However, school history's potential in relation to the current environmental crisis has gained relatively little attention from the field of history education. In particular, empirical studies exploring how history as a subject can help students deal with the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene are lacking. Moreover, several environmental humanities scholars, such as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, warn that some traditional aspects of history as a discipline may, in fact, limit our capacity to handle these issues. Within this context, my research aims to explore how history as a school subject in Swedish upper secondary school can support the development of competencies critical to dealing with issues concerning the environment and sustainability.