The Concept of Culture in Critical Mathematics Education

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a chapter published in The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77760-3A well-known critique in the research literature of critical mathematics education suggests that framing educational questions in cultural terms can encourage ethnic-cultural essentialism, obscure conflicts within cultures and promote an ethnographic or anthropological stance towards learners. Nevertheless, we believe that some of the obstacles to learning mathematics are cultural. ‘Stereotype threat’, for example, has a basis in culture. Consequently, the aims of critical mathematics education cannot be seriously pursued without including a cultural approach in educational research. We argue that an adequate conception of culture is available and should include normative/descriptive and material/ideal dyads as dialectical moments

‘PRi special edition: The intersections between public relations and neoliberalism’ – The road to nowhere: Re-examining activists’ role in civil societies

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) argued that the presence of critical counter-voices and powers is a fundamental element of any genuine democracy. However, in Australia these counter-voices are increasingly marginalized and threatened by controversial laws that would limit the legal standing of conservation groups and the use of overseas donations for advocacy purposes based on the argument that “systematic, well-funded” environmental campaigns are threatening the nation’s economic prosperity. Drawing on social movement theory and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this case study details the final months of the Save Beeliar Wetlands campaign in the lead up to the 2017 West Australian state election. The author challenges three common assumptions in the extant PR activism literature: The existence of activists in opposition to organizations and governments, the presence of a ‘zone of compromise’ between activists and the organizations or governments whose actions they are opposing and the conceptualization of activists as homogenous entity. Evolving into a colorful collective of over 35 local groups, five local councils and thousands of individuals, Beeliar Wetland Defenders successfully created an alternative narrative to the State and Federal Governments’ neoliberal agenda. Activists thereby contributed significantly to a change in leadership and the termination of a $1.9billion infrastructure project. This paper argues that activist groups’ interventions in public debate perform a valuable societal voice as critical counter-voices in challenging established hierarchies and power relationships. However, in mounting and framing their arguments within the neoliberal framework, activist groups may also inadvertently reinforce this worldview

Rethinking therapeutic strategies in cancer: wars, fields, anomalies and monsters

This article argues that the excessive focus on cancer as an insidious living defect that needs to be destroyed has obscured the fact that cancer develops inside human beings. Therefore, in order to contribute to debates about new cancer therapies, we argue that it is important to gain a broader understanding of what cancer is and how it might be otherwise. First, in order to reframe the debate, we utilize Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis in order to gain a stronger understanding of the structure of the (sub)field of cancer research. In doing so, we are able to see that those in a dominant position in the field, with high levels of scientific capital at their disposal, are in the strongest position to determine the type of research that is carried out and, more significantly, how cancer is perceived. Field analysis enables us to gain a greater understanding of the complex interplay between the field of science (and, more specifically, the subfield of cancer research) and broader sources of power. Second, we draw attention to new possible ways of understanding cancer in its evolutionary context. One of the problems facing cancer research is the narrow time frame within which cancer is perceived: the lives of cancer cells are considered from the moment the cells initially change. In contrast, the approach put forward here requires a different way of thinking: we take a longer view and consider cancer as a living entity, with cancer perceived as anomalous rather than abnormal. Third, we theorize the possibility of therapeutic strategies that might involve the redirection (rather than the eradication) of cancer cells. This approach also necessitates new ways of perceiving cancer

When the past comes back to haunt you: the enduring influence of upbringing on the work-family balance decisions of professional parents

Research on work-family balance decisions generally presents them as an individual’s rational choice between alternatives. The anticipatory socialisation literature highlights the role that early formative experiences play in shaping work and parenting decisions. We go further to emphasise the role of habitus – historically constituted dispositions – in the work-family balance decisions. This relational approach explores how the entrenched and historically formed dispositions of individuals interact dynamically with contextual (i.e. organizational) imperatives. Numerous studies have highlighted the difficulties of reconciling the intense demands of professional careers with family lives. Drawing on 148 interviews with 78 male and female professionals, our study looks at much deeper rooted causes of work-family conflict in professional service firms than have previously been considered. We identify four broad patterns of response to the work-family conflict: professionals may willingly reproduce their parental model, reproduce their parental model against their will, willingly distance themselves from their parental model, and distance themselves from the parental model against their will. We show that the impediments to greater equality lie not only in organizational and societal structures, but within individuals themselves in the form of historically constituted dispositions which contribute towards the maintenance and reproduction of those structures

Religious Tastes and Styles as Markers of Class Belonging: A Bourdieuian Perspective on Pentecostalism in South America

Studies on the relationship between social class and religion tend to highlight the demographic dimension of class, but neglect its symbolic dimension. By addressing the symbolic dimensions through a Bourdieuian approach, this article contends that religious tastes and styles can be employed as class markers within the sphere of religion. A case study on Argentinean Pentecostalism and in-depth analysis of a lower and middle class church illustrate how symbolic class differences are cultivated in the form of distinctive religious styles. While the lower class church displays a style marked by emotional expressiveness and the search for life improvement through spiritual practices, the middle class church performs a sober and calm style of Pentecostalism. The study highlights the role of styles in the reproduction of class boundaries, while shedding a critical light on the importance of tastes

The Political De-Determination of Legal Rules and the Contested Meaning of the ‘No Bailout’ Clause

Traditional debates on legal theory have devoted a great deal of attention to the question of the determinacy of legal rules. With the aid of social sciences and linguistics, this article suggests a way out of the ‘determinate-indeterminate’ dichotomy that has dominated the academic debate on the topic so far. Instead, a dynamic approach is proposed, in which rules are deemed to undergo processes of political ‘de-determination’ and ‘re-determination’. To illustrate this, the article uses the example of Art. 125 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the ‘no bailout’ provision, which played a major role in the management of the Euro-crisis. As will be shown, with the start of the crisis, this provision, whose meaning was once scarcely controversial, became the object of intense interpretative disagreement. As it became politically relevant, the rule also became the site of interpretative competitions, until the intervention of the European Court of Justice disambiguated and redefined its meaning

Towards a Critical Sociology of Dominant Ideologies: An Unexpected Reunion between Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski

This article aims to demonstrate the enduring relevance of Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski’s ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The production of the dominant ideology’], which was originally published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1976. More than three decades later, in 2008, a re-edited version of this study was printed in book format as La production de l’idéologie dominante, which was accompanied by a detailed commentary, written by Luc Boltanski and entitled Rendre la réalité inacceptable. À propos de « La production de l’idéologie dominante » [Making Reality Unacceptable. Comments on ‘The production of the dominant ideology’]. In addition to containing revealing personal anecdotes and providing important sociological insights, this commentary offers an insider account of the genesis of one of the most seminal pieces Boltanski co-wrote with his intellectual father, Bourdieu. In the Anglophone literature on contemporary French sociology, however, the theoretical contributions made both in the original study and in Boltanski’s commentary have received little – if any – serious attention. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature, arguing that these two texts can be regarded not only as forceful reminders of the fact that the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ is far from obsolete but also as essential for understanding both the personal and the intellectual underpinnings of the tension-laden relationship between Bourdieu and Boltanski. Furthermore, this article offers a critical overview of the extent to which the unexpected, and partly posthumous, reunion between ‘the master’ (Bourdieu) and his ‘dissident disciple’ (Boltanski) equips us with powerful conceptual tools, which, whilst illustrating the continuing centrality of ‘ideology critique’, permit us to shed new light on key concerns in contemporary sociology and social theory. Finally, the article seeks to push the debate forward by reflecting upon several issues that are not given sufficient attention by Bourdieu and Boltanski in their otherwise original and insightful enquiry into the complexities characterizing the daily production of ideology

Doing a transversal method: developing an ethics of care in a collaborative research project

Beck and Sznaider call for ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences doing a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in Science and Technology Studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a ‘transversal method’. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and in our ethnography gave rise to three practical challenges: 1) going beyond the individual project; 2) using each other’s field notes; 3) working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges we reflect on how this method required that we practice three modes of care: thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within