Although many scholars in the field of mathematics education are aware that identity discourses are highly political, research in the field usually lacks a framework theoretically and methodologically to address the political dimension of identity research. Based on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and the case of a female secondary school student at a German public school, the present paper analyses identity as a socio-political process of identity work articulated around the discourse of ‘refusing school mathematics’ in our contemporary times. Her refusal of mathematics is constituted around issues related to a series of noted classroom practices such as collective work, being together and having fun, relevance of mathematics in society and life, respect of one’s own dignity instead of becoming humiliated, and bodily activity instead of seated work. We illustrate how discourse theory allows us to see the identity work of refusing mathematics as a contingent process in a discursive field of socio-political struggle. In this process the subject moves beyond an essentialist ‘refusal’ of mathematics learning towards articulating her refusal of a particular mathematics education socio-materiality that needs to become subverted and reworked into more affirmative terms.

Teacher change towards developing competences for technology use in mathematics teaching has been the focus of current educational reforms worldwide. However, a considerable amount of research denotes the extent to which teachers resist a full integration of technology in mathematics classrooms. The present paper is based on an ethnographic study and focuses on how mathematics teachers – as they participate in an intensive training course – perform identity work whilst collectively articulating meanings concerning the potential of technology-based mathematics learning. By means of discourse theory, we analyse how they try to fix meaning as they engage and interact with varied discourses of ‘change’. Our findings indicate that mathematics teachers' attempts to articulate meaning are organised around discourses that concern directly societal and learning issues of technology use in mathematics teaching.

Our world is changing through increased techno-culture, digitalisation, enforced migration, transnational mobility, environmental calamity, wars, pandemics and amplified crises in a posthumanist, p...

This paper responds to the frequently occurring phenomena of ‘sad affects’ experienced by student teachers as they confront the logic of ‘proper mathematics’ with young children of differently abled bodies. The notion of ‘proper’ entails a normalizing fixity of ‘what counts’ as mathematics for certain children and fails to recognize mathematics as a sensual encounter amongst bodies. The study draws upon Spinoza’s notion of affect to consider the body’s capacity to act, and makes the case for choreographing with body-movement, rather than disclosing, the politics involved in becoming teachers. It discusses how affective bodying with mathematics, children and difference in the classroom practice can be not only deconstructed but also reconstructed in affirmative terms, choreographically, as feeling and thinking-in-movement in ways that trouble and perturb the prevailing sharing of the ‘sensible’ in early childhood mathematics and in teacher education.