Exhibition as pedagogy: teaching energy geographies through Sweden’s transformed world exhibition 2045

Teaching energy transitions requires students to engage with complex systems, contested futures and inequalities across places, scales and everyday life. This article explores how exhibitions can contribute to critical energy geography education. Using Sweden’s Transformed World Exhibition 2045, a digital exhibition developed from research on Sweden’s contested transition towards biofuels, we examine the pedagogical potential of exhibitions for geographical inquiry. Through three pedagogical pathways, orienting and unsettling, connecting and tracing, and questioning and reimagining, we show how the exhibition can open energy transitions to questions of representation, temporality, justice, classification, power and possible futures. More broadly, we identify three ways exhibitions can be mobilised in teaching: teachers can invite students to critically read existing exhibitions, asking how particular energy futures are staged and what they leave out; use curated exhibitions as teaching resources for exploring contested energy geographies; or involve students in making exhibitions and counter-exhibitions themselves. Ultimately, we propose counter-exhibitionary pedagogy as an approach that uses exhibition not to present transition as settled, but to make it available for questioning, connection and critique.