Doing Counterwork in Mathematics Education in the Age of Trump

• In Event: 25.067 - Challenging Trump's Xenophobic Fascism in the Era of Fake News: Presenting a Collective Front

Abstract

While systems of oppression and injustice have always existed, Trump’s presidency marks a different type of social and political arrangement. Trump’s campaign and presidency are mired in the logic of White supremacy. Trump’s anti-Black, anti-immigration, Islamophobia, and anti-feminist notion of “Making America Great Again” is an adaptive and flexible manifestation of White supremacy.
Mathematics education has increasingly been influenced by and aligned with the rhetoric and ideologies of the neoliberal racial project (Omi and Winant, 20014; Martin, 2012). This is seen in the prioritizing of mathematics knowledge in the development of military and national security technology as well as the commodification of learners as consumers conditioned to follow labor rules and consume goods (National Academy of Sciences 2005; U.S. Department of Education, 2008).
This session explores and conceptualizes counterwork in mathematics education as a critical element for resistance in the era of Trump. I draw on analytical concepts and orientations in activist and critical scholarship (Freire, 1994; 1998; 2000; Gilmore, 2008) to contribute to critiques and to consider new possibilities for mathematics education, particularly the role academic institutions can play to challenge our current socio-political order. I begin by summarizing some of the more salient points of neoliberalism as the ideological space driving STEM education, highlighting the racialized nature of internationalism and globalization. Then, I will describe a conceptualization of counterwork in mathematics education as unfinishedness and grounded in re(search), human agency, community solidarity, collective dreaming, and transformational resistance as central to a social justice agenda.

Author

• Cathery Yeh, Chapman University