Send message to Author

Short abstract:

Premised on the idea that learning occurs through shifts in participation in a community of practice, this collaborative data session will use third-world feminist methods to illuminate the material conditions, social relationships, and embodied practices out of which mathematical knowledge emerges.

Long abstract:

The goal of this session is to explore the social collaborative nature of mathematical work through a critical examination of the interactions between two professional mathematicians engaged in an afternoon of reading, writing, and mathematical problem solving. Drawing on Goodwin’s (2003) conceptualization of the semiotic body in its environment, my broader work is interested in offering an account of mathematics as an embodied practice that is accomplished through social interaction, the recruitment of tools, the creation of artifacts, and a coordinated assemblage of these tools, artifacts, and actors. Focusing on excerpts of interactions and events from an afternoon spent around the kitchen table with mathematicians Natalie and Usman, in this session we will unsettle normative understandings of mathematics as a non-material, abstract practice, instead making an intersectional queer feminist case for the embodied, concrete, social-relational nature of mathematical knowledge production.

The session being proposed will be run as a data-workshopping session using the methods of collaborative critical Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Together, participants will look at excerpts of video data of the two focal mathematicians working together to develop a mathematical concept for a paper they are writing. We will draw on postcolonial feminist perspectives (Ahmed, 2006) to make sense of how mathematical work unfolds, with the specific goal of understanding knowledge production in mathematics as a result of social-interactional, embodied, and emplaced negotiations.