BOOK REVIEW: WHAT\u27S ALL THE COMMOTION OVER COMMOGNITION? A REVIEW OF ANNA SFARD\u27S THINKING AS COMMUNICATING

If straight edge and compass constructions are the so-called “atoms” of Euclidean geometry, if sequences are the “atoms” of Analysis, then what are the “atoms” (if any) of mathematics education? Arguably mathematics education is a much wider field than Euclidean Geometry or Elementary Analysis, however there are several fundamental things that the field purports to study, chief among which is mathematical thinking or more generally “thinking”. The book under review, though it appears in a Cambridge University Press series entitled Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, is in my view situated at the intersection of Consciousness Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy and Mathematics Education. One does not come across books within the mathematics education genre that take on the tasks of operationalizing thinking and defining consciousness. This review began a year ago when an excerpt from the book was included in vol5, nos2&3 [July 2008] of the journal. My personal interest in the contents of the book lay in the promise that the book would tackle existing dichotomies in the current discourses on thinking with the aim of showing they are resolvable or even transcend-able

Affective Activism and Digital Archiving: Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid-19 Lockdown in India

This article traces what I term the affective activism of volunteers, civil society organiza- tions, and lorry drivers engaged in relief work to assist stranded migrant workers wanting to travel home during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and national lockdown in India. I define affective activism as an archival practice that is driven by relief figures’ af- fects of fear, anger, and aspirations—in this instance, toward their legal and administrative accountability to funders. Drawing on my ethnographic work in a relief network and using independent interviews I conducted, this article critically compares two modalities of dig- ital archiving conducted by relief figures: collecting migrant workers’ Aadhaar—unique biometric number identifiers issued to Indians—and digitally archiving their relief efforts through videos, voice-notes, and WhatsApp Messenger screenshots. I argue that relief fig- ures expressed their anxieties in the form of talismanic beliefs that records of Aadhaar and their material infrastructure would keep safe the migrant workers they were trying to help. Alternately, and sometimes, concomitantly, they performatively deployed Whatsapp artifacts to support their accountability in the face of bureaucratic and political specters. Both forms highlight the desire of relief figures to exceed paper forms and state practices in their archival impulses