Africanfuturism, Mathematics Education, and Public Health: Envisioning a Different Future

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. African Immigrant Youth: Schooling, Education, and Civic Engagement in the African Diaspora

Abstract

Critical mathematics education (CME) engages mathematics as a tool to understand social injustices and inequities in contexts that rarely include sub-Saharan African (SSA) youth. We reflect on our research collaboration within the context of CME between five SSA youth focused on a Youth Participatory Action Research project on public health. Our paper challenges the conditioned belief that traditional medicine had little benefit as compared to western medicine. We do this by interrogating whose mathematics knowledges are elevated considering the intricate presence of mathematics in the everyday activities of SSA youth.

Less than a year after data generation ended, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in late November 2021, the world witnessed the blatant anti-African rhetoric around the Omicron variant. Consequently, we will engage with Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturism as a framework to explore the African immigrant experience by asking what is, what can, and what will be of transnational experiences of African immigrant youth in the context of mathematics education and inequities around global vaccine inequity (e.g., western countries offering vaccine booster shots while many on the African continent still lack the first dose of the vaccine).

We analyze the thread between mathematics education and public health for African immigrant youth as we see the urgency in these issues and their relevance in teaching and research. Audiences of our work are multiple, but we believe teachers, community educators, African immigrant youth along with their families, and researchers will find relevance in our work.

Authors

• Molade Osibodu, York University
  Presenting Author

• Nyimasata Damba Danjo
  Presenting Author