Inspiriting a Disembodying of the "Dream of a Single Logic": A Response to Elizabeth Mowat and Brent Davis

First paragraph: In his book, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth, David Geoffrey Smith (2006) exhorts us to consider the violence embodied in the dream of the universality of a single logic. It is in the discursive acts of willing a single logic such as those found behind the motivations of various social and political activities exemplified in the newest globalizing iterations of empire that such a totalizing violence occurs. Such a colonizing gaze constructs a natural/naturalizing Truth in its own terms within which "the normal" is constituted as a stable, unified/unifying entity that tolerates no threat of "deviance". Set against this disturbing and warlike dream of singularity is the recognition of a pluralistic and complex world that (re)generates a vast network of associations, relationships, and interconnections that are far from simple, bounded or unified. More important, it is a world that is complicated and cannot be reduced to narrow singularities or neatly coherent and stable universals. It is this sense of a richly complex world that a complexivist approach endorses and legitimizes. It marks a shift in emphasis away from discrete objects of observation toward their fluid interconnections and the complex patterns of such relationships. This shift is not only a shift in what is being seen, but is a promise of the possibility of a shift in ways of seeing

Cultural Beads and Mathematical AIDS: A critical narrative of disadvantage, social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid South Africa, with reflections and implications for ‘glocal’ contexts

Drawn from my doctoral dissertation[i], this contribution serves as a critical exploration of the construction of disadvantage in school mathematics in social context. Applying a narrative-based methodology, CULTURAL BEADS AND MATHEMATICAL A.I.D.S. engages rhizomatically with critical issues in mathematics education and highlights contradictions and dilemmas within different research and pedagogic contexts. It addresses dominant social domain discourses and hegemonic practices in classrooms and communities of practice in terms of ‘glocal' relationships and principles of power. More specifically, it addresses issues of universalism, pedagogic constructivism, and progressivism in mathematics education, and how these are recontextualised in local contexts in ways that may contribute to the construction of disadvantage. In particular, progressive education rhetoric of ‘relevance' in mathematics education is interrogated in terms of its recontextualisation across pedagogic locations, and how it might facilitate pedagogic disempowerment rather than liberation in situated contexts

Where have all the fishes gone?: Living Ubuntu as an ethics of research and pedagogical engagement

First paragraph: Deeply disappointed, I stood looking at the gate, chained and bolted closed. There was a fine stillness that threaded itself diaphanously through the soft zephyr of early afternoon, like the breath of dissipated anticipation. The red brick school building stood there empty and alone as if mocking my memory of the happenings within it some years prior. I could discern the dappled shadows of the past behind the veil of an existent manifestation of reality. I could feel the sunlit-afternoon ghosts of that present intruding on the past, trying to trick my consciousness, attempting to reconstitute history and replace it with current phantasms of a vacant school and post-apartheid South Africa, like simulacra, as if they were the new ‘real'. The background white noise of nearby traffic and the faint lull of waves against the barnacled pier in the nearby harbour seemed, for a moment, to pause, and the audience of my consciousness hushed as if some premier performance was about to begin...

Where have all the fishes gone?: Living Ubuntu as an ethics of research and pedagogical engagement

First paragraph: Deeply disappointed, I stood looking at the gate, chained and bolted closed. There was a fine stillness that threaded itself diaphanously through the soft zephyr of early afternoon, like the breath of dissipated anticipation. The red brick school building stood there empty and alone as if mocking my memory of the happenings within it some years prior. I could discern the dappled shadows of the past behind the veil of an existent manifestation of reality. I could feel the sunlit-afternoon ghosts of that present intruding on the past, trying to trick my consciousness, attempting to reconstitute history and replace it with current phantasms of a vacant school and post-apartheid South Africa, like simulacra, as if they were the new ‘real'. The background white noise of nearby traffic and the faint lull of waves against the barnacled pier in the nearby harbour seemed, for a moment, to pause, and the audience of my consciousness hushed as if some premier performance was about to begin...

Ubuntu: An African contribution to (re)search for/with a 'humble togetherness'

This article is a discussion in two parts. The first part addresses the Southern African indigenous philosophy of Ubuntu, providing it with a working definition and situating it within African epistemology and the socio-political contexts of its invocation. It raises critical concerns about Ubuntu's embrace in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its promulgation as an ideology within the nation-building project of post-apartheid South Africa. Such concerns are referenced with respect to Ubuntu's formulation within the advocacies of cultural nationalism. Nevertheless, the discussion commits to perspectives of possibility towards disrupting neoliberalism and decolonizing hegemonic meanings, and advances a debate towards transformation and transcendence within a post-apartheid context. The second part follows on from the arguments in the first part, which set the stage for a narrative journeying of a more personal nature. It offers a reflexive account of how Ubuntu was used as a guiding principle for engagement in fieldwork and the structuring of a qualitative research methodology. The narrative tone is somewhat different to that of the first part, which offers critical perspectives within a broad socio-political discussion. The second part moves from a national level to a local level. It locates more personal interactions and a search for a ‘humble togetherness' within the context of a township school in South Africa. The article closes with a somewhat cautionary note on how a philosophy such as Ubuntu might be taken up in a political institutional forum that has unwanted implications, but it also advocates for Ubuntu in providing legitimizing spaces for transcendence of injustice and a more democratic, egalitarian and ethical engagement of human beings in relationship with each other. In this sense, Ubuntu offers hope and possibility in its contribution to human rights

"Disadvantage" and School Mathematics: The Politics of Context

Understanding school mathematics as a discourse of power that (re)produces social inequality, requires, from a critical sociological perspective, invoking a conception of it as a non-neutral discourse that produces contextual realisations according to principles of power. To set the tone, this paper makes a few assertions about school mathematics to support my position and to undergird my discussion on the relationship between discourse and practice in mathematics classroom contexts. This study sets out to provide a sociological slant to the issues that influence classroom mathematics practices, most especially practices that construct members of school communities, such as teachers and, especially, their students, in terms of “disadvantage” in relation to school mathematics. This sociological approach focuses on the concomitant relationship between the ways in which students (and teachers) are spoken about in terms of social difference, (such as gender, class, race, culture, language, and ability, amongst others), and the kinds of differentiated practices which are afforded them, or in which they engage, in the mathematics classroom. This approach is a break from the more usual cognition-based approach to mathematics education

Ubuntu, Radical Hope, and an Onto-epistemology of Conscience

Via the evocation of a lived narrative related to witnessing Middle Eastern refugees’ attempts at entering into the European Union in September 2015, I draw connections between the political, ethical, spiritual and embodied, recognising their always-already be(com)ing enmeshed and relational. This narrative rendering enables an introduction to the African indigenous thought of Ubuntu. Ubuntu offers an ontological relationality of the human condition that brings into play the courage of radical hope and the hope of a more fully human existence, one that is more ethical and just than the globallylegitimised vulnerability and dehumanisation that the Middle Eastern ‘refugees’ struggling for safety and a viable existence are constituted within. Butler (2004, 20) reminds us that we are “constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies”, ones “attached to others”, “at risk of losing those attachments”, and in the sense of Ubuntu, thus also at risk of losing our humanity as a consequence. I argue that it is through these attachments, in the surface-to-surface embodiments of our souls, in our ‘intersoular’ states and Ubuntu ways of being and knowing, that we can find a radical, ethical and courageous hope in the ontoepistemology of conscience, and thus become human

Power and Poverty - Whose, Where, and Why?: School Mathematics, Context and the Social Construction of "Disadvantage"

This paper compares the discourse and practice of school mathematics in two socioeconomically different school contexts in post-apartheid South Africa. It addresses the relationship between constructed "difference" and "pedagogized disadvantage." In other terms, it looks at the way in which certain students, spoken-of in terms of "deficit" and "disadvantage", are afforded differentiated school mathematics discourse that situates them in terms of "failure". Consequently, these socially constructed students are not provided with access to pedagogic or socio-economic empowerment. The paper examines the role of social context in the elaboration of social difference discourses and their recontextualization into mathematics in ways that recruit psychologizing positions, thus pathologizing students and producing disabling pedagogies

Teaching Mathematics in Two Independent School Contexts: the construction of "good practice"

This paper compares constructions of mathematics teaching and learning practices in two geographically different school contexts. It looks at the constructions of "good practice" within the schooling communities across these two contexts and describes some similarities and differences between them. It provides an interpretation of these differently constructed practices as being contingent on the socially situated contexts of the two schools and schooling communities. Consequently, it problematizes the rhetoric of the reformist movement in education premised on slogans for "better education" which tend to universalize "good" or "progressive" practices, and which often do not consider the complex and contingent nature of school mathematics discourse and practice, or the socio-cultural and historical differences in contexts of schooling

Neoliberalism, education and citizenship rights of unemployed youth in post-apartheid South Africa

Via the evocation of two personal narratives of lived experiences of/with youth in South Africa, the paper addresses issues relating to youth, unemployment, education and structural injustice. These narrative vignettes reflect events of injustice that occur within the human sphere and fall within the interstices between competing discourses as sites of struggle for meaning and supremacy. It is here where the lived effects of unjust political structures can be witnessed as violent assaults on individual and collective bodies, psyches and souls, while the indomitability of the human spirit rallies to rise above such adversity. Both experiences, while specific, nevertheless articulate a difficult ‘glocalising' relationship with ‘the general' and ‘universal' in the global interconnectedness of injustice and the effects of a dehumanising ideology. They are underscored by a historical legacy of apartheid and authoritarianism, but advanced through a newer discourse of neoliberal, globalising modernism. Both ideologies converge in untroubled alignment through similarly operational codes of control and the endemic forms and frames of (in)difference. The paper argues that racialised unemployed youth in South Africa carry the burden of structural political dysfunctionality and state ineptitude, and they are pathologised and differentially constructed as ‘failed' citizens as a consequence. Not only are South African youth expected to carry the burden of unemployment, but also the flag of the nation's political transformation as well, in a context of contradiction and maladministration overlaid by the debilitating effects of neoliberal governmentality. Youth identity is framed in nationalist economic terms, justified and advanced through the contemporary, global, modernist condition, supported by neoliberal capitalist relations. The historical, embodied and material injustices shape what is possible for youth, specifically unemployed youth, in South Africa today