Ontology and Agency: A Badiouian Critique on Political Mathematics Pedagogies

• In Event: Knowledge and Cognition

Abstract

This essay utilizes Alain Badiou’s philosophical framework to explore an alternative pedagogy for mathematics education that can bring forth a new political agent for envisioning democratic ideals. Political mathematics pedagogies, such as critical mathematics pedagogy and ethnomathematics, are put into question based on Badiou’s philosophical concepts of truths and human subjects. The author asks how mathematics knowledge can be reorganized pedagogically to lead to a Badiouian event of some subject to recognize some particular truth. Mathematics as an ontological discourse is re-envisioned as a education subject that opens the possibility for political agency previous pedagogies have missed.

Author

• Nataly Z. Chesky, SUNY - College at New Paltz