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

Mathematics, capitalism and biosocial research

In my previous work, I criticised studies within the sociopolitical turn for disavowing a comprehension of schools as places of capitalist production. Here, I extend this critique to what is being flagged as a new turn in educational research. I am referring to biosocial research, particularly in the way it is coupled with new materialist and more than human philosophies in the work of Elizabeth de Freitas. I use elements from Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore the concomitances between mathematics and capitalism, showing how both mathematics and capital need to suture the subject in order to thrive. Biosocial research epitomises this drive towards automation and totality, and, notwithstanding de Freitas’ attempts to rescue it from the logic of control, I will argue that agent-centred intentions dismiss the underlying workings of capital as a real abstraction. I do so by engaging with elements of Deleuze’s philosophy, showing how the more than human frame in which de Freitas’ biosocial research rests contradicts her own perception of how biosocial research can be rescued for inclusive purposes