How to Be a Political Social Change Mathematics Education Activist

Abstract

Three sets of nomadic epistemological categories (Deleuze and Guattari) that coexist with other theoretical frameworks of mathematics education discourse and practice are used to suggest an approach to changing ourselves as mathematics educators through the ways that we think and act. The argument is that these reconceptualizing processes can change our worlds of possibility for mathematics education while allowing coexistence with more mainstream programs of research and practice: Arendt’s work, labor and action; Pitt’s youth leadership, voice and participation; and McElheny’s architectural, scientific, and artistic models. Such epistemological categories establish topologies, reconstructing subjectivities in the process—a tactic of alterglobal social movements that potentially politicize mathematics education: we change ourselves to change the world. Psychoanalytic responses to the terror of change, and the need to address the legacies of mathematics as a component of colonialism, are considered as components of broader social change.