Mathematics for “citizenship” and its “other” in a “global” world: critical issues on mathematics education, globalisation and local communities

Our world is changing through increased techno-culture, digitalisation, enforced migration, transnational mobility, environmental calamity, wars, pandemics and amplified crises in a posthumanist, postindustrial, postcapitalist, and neoliberal economy that compels people to move across borders. Within this social and material transformation, educators, educational researchers and policymakers frequently employ the terms citizenship and globalisation, as catchphrases to discuss the challenges of interconnectedness and the interdependencies between cultures, nations and peoples, yet without offering an explanation of their historical, cultural, economic, and political significance. The impetus towards a globalised world can also be recognised today in the context of mathematics education practices, in boosted endeavours for performing certain skills and competencies, which are assumed to be universal and normative, in a sphere made increasingly transnational by digitalisation, curricular reforms, assessment, institutional restructuring and educational renewals.

However, the utopian dream of a global world is not new. A comparative history of political cultures and schooling in the long nineteenth century until today informs how educational bodies, along with religion morals and enlightenment archetypes, have served to fabricate the notion of the modern citizen (Tröhler, Popkewitz, & Labaree, 2011) that unfolds into the virtuous ideals of a rational subject, skilful problem solver and competent reasoner. Despite the dubiousness of those ideals, they relate to the twin notions of citizen and noncitizen that can be located in citizenship genealogies, connected to sovereign power from ancient times to modernity and up until our temporality (see Chronaki, in press¹). Globalised imageries of today, in fact, reiterate historical cultural narratives that fabricate the world as the home and make the child a productive member of that home and a future-to-come (Popkewitz, 2009; see also Yolcu, 2021). In the context of these imageries, the unexamined urge for development of self and society through education and, specifically, mathematics education needs disruption (Chronaki, 2011).

The hope for global futures divides people into proper “citizens” and their “others”, through governing technologies that regulate human differences in the realm of discursive and material spaces. Such governing technologies cater for education and lifelong-learning, support with adequate managerial leadership, provide qualifications for “flexible” job conditions and offer salvation promises for a moral, ethical, successful, and pleasurable life in a diverse global society (Hultqvist, Lindblad, & Popkewitz, 2018). They serve for an increased commodification, corporatisation, privatisation and marketisation of education through the production of digitised materials, curricula, textbooks or services in the realm of transnational, transcultural and translingual mobility (see Darragh, 2021; Povey & Adams, 2021).

Specifically, in mathematics education, we confront today a wide circulation of a universal imagery of mathematical literacy in teaching and learning practices, resources and services, along with international evaluations such as PISA or TIMMS. Nations are compared according to specific definitions of what mathematically literate citizens are and how they can perform predetermined competences (e.g. Valero, 2017; see Andrade-Molina, 2021). In this, the couplet of self/society development is entangled with discourses of equity and quality in mathematics education practices, with effects for both cyborgs (i.e. communication technology literates) and subalterns (i.e. the marginalised, illiterate, or voiceless) (Chronaki, 2011). These knowledge and skills not only produce an (im)material labour for a future-to-come but also configure racialised strategies of unfolding cultural, religious, linguistic, racial, and body differences (see Valoyes-Chávez, Montecino, & Guzmán, 2021).

In previous related work, mathematics education has been discussed in relation to citizenship and globalisation by considering its epistemic and pedagogic status. The common belief of mathematics as a universal and value-free subject is troubled through comparisons of cultural differences and similarities, rather than reporting “gaps” across the nations that are found in conventional comparative studies (Atweh et al., 2007). These critical efforts in mathematics education challenged the Euro-centric notions of mathematical knowledge through bringing local practices to the forefront and redefining mathematical literacy for a responsible citizenship (Powell & Frankenstein, 1997). Critical perspectives with emancipatory positions aim to open up democratic possibilities by unleashing peoples’ critical mathematical capacities (Skovsmose, 1992); and cultural perspectives represent the diversity of marginalised voices, interests and practices (Bishop, 1991; d'Ambrosio, 1985). However, despite unsettling mainstream mathematical knowledge, critical and cultural perspectives might also unintentionally invest in the re-making of citizens who can contribute to the development of a global knowledge society and its progress. Without problematising the intertwined processes of making the self and the “other” in mathematics teaching and learning, one might assume that “equal” opportunities are safeguarded for “all” students as desired and viable citizens. Yolcu (2019), in a recent review on equitable mathematics education practices, points out that exclusionary effects are maintained even by cultural and critical approaches to prepare productive, informative, and reflective citizenry.

In such a context, how could the “future” of mathematics education be reimagined and reconfigured when the rhetoric of critical global citizenship education meets diverse localities? What are the effects of such political imaginaries and governing when they start becoming materialised in the context of diverse localities for children, youth, teachers and materials, as well as for markets, economies and policies? And, moreover, what are the local hybrid mathematical subjectivities and bordered ways of knowing that these intensifications unfold?

This Special Issue (SI) discusses how current visions of “globality” reconfigure notions of “citizenship” and its “other” through mathematics education practices. The idea emerged from a symposium created by the first editor for the 10th Mathematics Education and Society conference where the boundaries of global policies in local practices were explored and in which the concept of citizenship was core (Chronaki et al., 2019). Within this SI, we continue the critical conversations across seven contributions with scholars who are located in diverse geographic localities that belong in what, by and large, is referred to as the global North or South (UK, New Zealand, Sweden, Scotland) or periphery countries (Greece, Turkey, Chile, South Africa). These contributing papers examine the fabrication of desired citizens and their “others” in diverse spaces and times and could be grouped into empirical and conceptual studies.

The empirical studies unfold critical theoretical analysis of mathematics classroom discourse based on ethnographic data and textual material such as official documents, textbooks or teacher and learner resources of an innovative digital or hands on nature. They discuss how the learner is figured as a future (non)citizen through discourses of racialisation (Valoyes-Chávez et al., 2021), digitalisation (Darragh, 2021), internationalisation (Yolcu, 2021) but also through images of global citizenship in OECD documents (Andrade-Molina, 2021) and teacher resources (Povey & Adams, 2021). The empirical studies differ in their methodological preferences. Two of them undertake discursive analysis of online resources and curricular materials (Darragh, 2021; Yolcu, 2021), one focuses on an ethnographic study (Valoyes-Chávez et al., 2021) and two experiment with aleatory genres of analysis and presentation of OECD documents and European-Union funded projects (Andrade-Molina, 2021; Povey & Adams, 2021).

Finally, the two conceptual studies emphasise the need to embrace new perspectives for theorising the very concept of “citizenship” in the context of a globalised neoliberal economy grounded in the history of colonial practices and power concerning the governing of a political community that travels across spaces and time. The specific case of “global citizenship” is unfolded and critiqued in the face of societal challenges that craft the global, responsible mathematical citizen, while its disruption is proposed through decolonial scholarship (le Roux & Swanson, 2021). And, lastly, the idea of “citizenship” is examined through a critical genealogy of its political philosophy that reveals, on the one hand, strong ties with sovereign power and subject governance in which the mathematical subject is core and, on the other hand, the antinomies of this assemblage in the body politic (Chronaki, in press). Papers in this SI collectively problematise the configuration of mathematics education and its subjects as entities which can join in the desire for developing the enlightened mathematical citizen for a globalised world. Below, each one of the papers will be summarised.

Valoyes-Chávez et al. (2021) consider the context of transnational mobility and examine how racial differences are fabricated in a Chilean school for adults. Conducting in-depth interviews both with Black Haitian immigrants and their Chilean, white-mestizo mathematics teacher, they unpack racialized discourses embedded in the pedagogical management of student population who are considered as diverging from the norms of schooling and society. This study contributes to our conversation in the SI by arguing that mathematics education relegates black immigrants to second-class citizenship rather than functioning as an empowering tool to either access the labour market or participate in political and civic spaces in the host countries.

The research by Darragh (2021) illustrates how the promises of innovative digital resources to mathematics education produce two types of mathematics learners: engaged mathematical citizens; and their fragile “others”, who are lacking the norms of competition, levels of confidence, and measurable progress. She specifically reads critically online mathematics education platforms, which have been intensified with the COVID-19 outbreak, by addressing how these programmes problematically reproduce normative ideals of privatisation, standardisation, high-stakes assessment, corporate management and accountability. Without closely listening to people’s needs and hopes, international private corporations are contributing to a deficit perspective on not only mathematics learners but also their local communities.

The meeting of global and local is far from being reductive and assimilative but it generates a set of power relations and enables further production of discourses and practices for school mathematics. Current reform efforts and policies to internationalise school mathematics share the aspirations of a cosmopolitan worldview whilst they simultaneously embody the historical premises and cultural rules of local contexts that (re)produce particular human kinds and fabricate their differences into a hierarchy. In this line, Yolcu (2021) examines how internationally designated mathematical competencies assemble with national-historical trajectories of school mathematics in Turkey. While reimagining the nation and its citizens for a globalised world, mathematics education reforms are discursively enacting a differentiated mechanism that divides the desired “active” citizen and its “passive” other through pedagogical devices that serve to hide hierarchies.

It is important to note how the work of local communities can support us to interrogate and critique naturalised visions of “citizenship” in a “global” world by taking into consideration how “other” hybrid notions of mathematical subjectivities and “border” knowledges can emerge within and across the discourses of globalism in mathematics education. Through their “disorderly” interruptions, Povey and Adams (2021) not only interrogate the taken for granted common sense meanings of concepts in the field such as “mathematics” and “global citizenship” but also mathematics education as an “academic” field itself. Concerned with the ethical dilemmas embedded in the design and implementation of a European Union funded project focused towards preparing mathematics teachers and students for global citizenship, they question both the neoliberal grounds of “global citizenship” agendas and the dominant mathematics education practices in schools that are also colonised by (neo)liberal regimes.

During the last decades, a global world imaginary has gained momentum about how the lives of youth, children, families, communities and educators are being (or could be) reconfigured, along with their labour, behaviour, consumption habits, leisure activity, through relaunching images of citizenship for globality such as “digital”, “multilingual”, “intercultural”, “creative”, “critical” or “rational” and turning them into strategic areas for curricular organisation by institutional bodies such as UNESCO, the OECD, the UN and the European Union. These images of citizenship are entangled with fundamental notions in mathematics education such as development and achievement aiming for success. Andrade-Molina (2021) asks: what does it mean for the mathematical learner to aim at being successful in our globalised world and what is the cost? Her rhizomatic reading of OECD publications provides hints to unpack the dominant narratives of “success” and its twin element of “failure” in these transnational policies. She elaborates how promises of “math for all” simultaneously produce inequalities and exclusions in the name of achieving success, economic progress, social welfare, equity, and social justice.

le Roux and Swanson (2021) develop a conceptual framework for “decolonial thinking” that addresses the historical co-constitution of global, local, and mathematical knowledge for citizenship subjectivity. They focus on scholarship that foregrounds the work of indigenous, diasporic and marginalised communities with enormous efforts for reclaiming identity and revitalising local knowledge, languages and cultures. In this vein, they discuss how educational institutions, including mathematics education policies and practices, can be reorganised otherwise, to strive for autonomy through collaboration across disciplinary areas in ways that undo colonial hierarchies. They offer a set of questions that can provoke reflexive and critical thinking about the network of practices in school mathematics such as curriculum, activities, learning materials and practices, and the positionings of social actors, including scholars and practitioners in mathematics education. Far from a prescription, these questions denote the drives of local communities, practitioners, or researchers to undo the borders and join similar efforts at a global level helping to bring forward democratic demands for decolonisation, liberation, and emancipation, instead of subordination to profit or homogenisation.

Finally, Anna Chronaki (in press) focuses on the idea of citizenship through a critical genealogy that unfolds its European origin and its close ties with sovereign power and the mathematical ideas of reason and rationality at the expense of nomadic life. Resorting to the political philosophy of Étienne Balibar and his discussion of “citizenship” as the antinomies of becoming citizen subject in the body politic, she encounters “citizenship” in three significant temporalities, the archaic, the modern and the biopolitical. The antinomies traced in ancient times, concerning equal distribution of power to all, and in modern times, attending to the “right to rights” for all, are present in the current equity-oriented and socially just reforms in mathematics education. Taking into account that today the citizen’s life and death become a matter of biopolitical governing, based on data driven algorithms, the issue of mathematical citizenship as a posthuman condition and its antinomic relation to the body politic remains at stake in our current discussions.

Citizenship remains a contested concept driving claims of rights, recognition, equity and human agency, bearing upon issues of participation, subjugation and in/exclusions in the political community. Whilst we cannot avoid engaging with a systematic critique of its neο/liberal translations to current mathematics education policy, and practice, its emergent capacity for democratising relations in mathematics classrooms remains to be reclaimed. Our collective conversation can be of relevance to mathematics education scholars who are interested in how issues of citizenship and globalisation are at stake in classroom practice, curricular reformation, educational policies, or even mathematics education research. We present a range of critical methodologies and diverse perspectives to explore (im)possibilities of mathematics education in relation to new visions of a “global” world. Particularly, a discursive reading of policies and practices in mathematics education can provide an avenue for scholars interested in processes of subjectification in/through school mathematics. Summing up, we are aware of the fact that this research field is and will be maturing and more will come with collective action and reflection on the issues raised by the contributors of this SI. We wish to continue the critical conversations that explore how the utopian dream of “globality” unfolds in diverse contexts of mathematics education and how the hopes for globalised futures materialise through pedagogic relations, cultural practices and local communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Chronaki’s paper will appear in one of the issues of volume 24, but is part of the collection of articles for this Special Issue.