Monument(al) Challenges in Focus: Report from Sweden

The Swedish workshop took place on October 27th, in Hudiksvall, a smaller city about 270 kilometres north of Stockholm. Invited to the workshop were teachers from Hudiksvall municipality and the neighbouring municipality of Ljusdal. All those invited were history teachers working with students ages 7 to 19, along with a few colleagues who work with municipal adult education. 

The Monument(al) Challenges program is part of the Contested History Initiative, which proved challenging for us, being situated in a small rural town in Sweden with very few local historical monuments to work with. If we look at the monuments we do have, it is hard to claim that they are examples of contested history. Therefore, we chose to focus our workshop on the history represented in the local monument and on the history that has been omitted. We also wanted to focus on hands-on activities to provide the participants with actual tools to use with their own students. 

The workshop was led jointly by John Hjalmarsson and Jens Andersson, who started with an introduction to the Monument(al) Challenges project and to the Contested History Initiative’s Manifesto. Participants were introduced to the “Emotional Networking” method, and sugar was chosen as the focus for the exercise. For this, the Vipeholm experiments were introduced as a very controversial scientific study that happened in Sweden between 1945 and 1955, where patients at a mental institution unknowingly were used as test subjects in a study on caries (tooth decay). The exercise led to a fruitful discussion, and the workshop participants appreciated the Emotional Networking method. 

Later on, the Monument(al) Challenges Toolkit and the Contested Histories Initiative database were presented. John and Jens highlighted the example of “comfort” women and also offered their own Swedish example of a controversial monument: a statue of King Karl XII, a seventeenth-century Swedish king traditionally hailed as a warrior king.  After discussing how to view and interpret monuments and which history to display, the participants were tasked with designing their own monument. The idea was to design a local historical monument; in other words, the task entailed both deciding what history to display and how to display it. Participants came up with a variety of interesting ideas, which sparked further discussion. 

In the second part of the day, the Swedish team set out on a walk around town to view and discuss the monuments in central Hudiksvall. The walk sparked a lively discussion on several topics: How was the decision made about which history to display? How is the choice of placement made? Many monuments were almost hidden from the public eye. Naturally, since all participants were teachers, the discussions often returned to the topic: “How can I use this in class?” 

The day was concluded with discussions around the use of history, the relative lack of contested history monuments in the area and how to use what we had learned during the day in our own classroom. A final reflection, shared by everyone, was that the day had been an example of the kind of continuing professional development we often lack: fruitful discussion with our peers.