Anne-Kathrin Peters

My interest is the role of education and technology for change towards more just and sustainable ways of living. I am particular interested in the intersection of what is referred to as social sustainability (equality, equity, justice, democracy) and environmental sustainability. I am researching norms, values, and identities in education and how they are produced in power relations in education. Emotions and care ethics in education have been important topics for me. Most of my work has been in computing education but I have also been a part of and moved between other research communities in the past years including, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, ICT for sustainability, gender research (feminist technology studies), and futures studies.

Current projects and roles

I coordinate the focus group “education for sustainable development” within the Swedish Higher Educations' climate network (Klimatnätverket). I share this role with Cecilia Enberg from Linköping University. Our task is to promote and support change in higher education so that higher education addresses our sustainability challenges and predicaments. I am also a member of the Advisory Board at the Excited Centre at NTNU in Norway, the Center for Excellent IT education, advising especially on the topic of “IT education for sustainability and a digital future”.

At KTH, I am a member of the faculty board of the School of Industrial Engineering and Management (ITM). The faculty boards have recently been brought to life, to move towards collegial leadership at KTH.

At the Department of Learning, I am leading the research cluster ”Transformative REsearch in Education for Sustainability” (TREES) together with Anders Rosén and Björn Hedin.

I am supervising two PhD students: Maria Jobenius is a part of TREES and an industrial PhD student working with sustainability transitions at Scania. I am co-supervising  Sofia Strömqvist who is working with accessibility in digitalisation at the  School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with Jan Gulliksen as main supervisor.

Together with Jan Gulliksen, I lead the project Digitalisation and education transformation: improving the conditions for students and teachers with cognitive impairments, which is funded by Digital Futures at KTH. Masood Rangraz, postdoc at the department of Learning, works with us in this project.

I am also working in a project Teaching natural science and technology in the Anthropcene financed by Universitets- och Högskolerådet (UHR). Here we develop higher education for sustainability in a team of 15 teachers in the fields of natural science and technology from Stockholm University and KTH and six education researchers / education developers (Leif Dahlberg and myself from KTH and Veronica Flodin, Iann Lundegård, Eva Österlind, Miriam Huitric from Stockholm University).

I am also involved in various other initiatives to develop higher education at KTH. For example, in a group of teachers at the Department of Media Technology, we are exploring emotions in sustainability education such as anxiety, dread, and hope .

Together with Lotta Delin,  I coordinate a collegial network on equality, diversity, and equal opportunities in education (priU JML) at KTH. Here we work closely together with the collegial network on sustainability in education (priU HU) at KTH led by Héléne Hermansson-Järvenpää and Anders Rosén.

My teaching is in higher education courses, offered to teachers at KTH and beyond. I am currently responsible for the basic course "Teaching and Learning in Higher Education”, which is compulsory for teachers to take before becoming a docent. Other courses I am involved in are listed below.

Background

Before I joint KTH in 2021, I worked at Uppsala University (2011-2021), at the Department of Information Technology. I coordinated the Climate Change Leadership (CCL) Initiative, one of five sustainability initiatives at Uppsala University. In this role, I supported cross-disciplinary research collaborations and project proposals on societal transformation and climate action. I have taught at the IT department and at Cemus, the centre for environment and development studies. I was also a member of the gender equality group at the IT department for several years.

I have a computing and teaching degree from Germany. Before moving to Sweden in 2011, I worked as a mathematics and computer science teacher at a high school in Berlin. I also worked with IT at Philips Medical Systems for several years during my studies.