Nathalie Sinclair

This talk aims to tackle the problem of the local and the global in mathematics education, drawing on how this problem is framed by feminist, political thinkers as they engage planetary concerns. The feminist assertion that 'the personal is political' is now becoming ‘the personal is geological', inviting attention to different scales of mattering and how they relate. I will work through these ideas to offer new spatial and temporal imaginaries for thinking these multiple scales within mathematics education, including ones that engage the quantum, the speculative and the deep. This ecologically framed work is directly linked to current scholarship emphasizing the imperialist and colonial nature of post-enlightenment (school) mathematics. I will argue that different space-time modes of thinking are needed to adequately handle local-global relations and make possible an earthbound, pluralist mathematics.

Nathalie is Distinguished University Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She has worked on developing digital technologies to expand the scope of aesthetic encounters in mathematics—for example, the multitouch application TouchCounts. She has also contributed to theoretical insights in mathematics education, working from critical feminist perspectives, in collaboration with Elizabeth de Freitas—see Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom—that draw extensively on the history and philosophy of mathematics.