Theorizing Complex Embodiment in Mathematics: Intersectionality, Emotion, and Relationships in Mathematical Identity Development

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Ability, Normativity, and Equity: Methodologies in Mathematics Education Resistance and Justice

Abstract

Mathematics education has not done enough to understand how race, language, gender, and disability impact students' embodied experiences in the mathematics classroom. As a collaborative across mathematics education, LatCrit and Disability Studies in Education (DSE), we integrate theories from Disability Studies (DS) that do more than call into question the social construction of disability (the social model)—we work to simultaneously center embodied experience, including emotion, cognitive and physical experience. Bringing the theory of complex embodiment (Siebers 2008) from DS into mathematics education (Authors 2019; 2020: 2021), we map embodied differences, as well as social construction and feeling-meaning making (Lemke, 2013) around those differences creating a new theory of Complex Embodiment in Mathematics.

With his theory of complex embodiment, disabled scholar Tobin Siebers (2008) rejected both the purely social model, for ignoring embodiment, and the medical model, which defines disability as individual and requiring “intervention.” He defined disability as “a social location complexly embodied” (p. 14). Disability is not solely within the body, nor a social construction. It is both. Thus, when we describe a body, we use concepts formed in social and emotional worlds, which in turn shape our bodies. Siebers argues attention to the body can never be an afterthought when interrogating disability, because the body is the site of political resistance.

Bringing this theory to mathematics education, we extend complex embodiment by foregrounding intersectionality - attending to how students’ identities (race, disability, gender, language, etc) impact their embodied and emotional experiences in mathematics. Unlike the traditional use of embodiment in mathematics education, we center emotion as part of embodiment. Embodiment matters for how math class is experienced, and how individual and collective feeling-meaning-making through emotion in narratives and discourse happens in mathematics. In addition, our work draws from the growing field of emotional geographies (Davidson & Smith, 2009), which highlights the importance of viewing emotion through narrative, discourse, time and space. To better understand intersectionality, we map circulating master narratives (Bamburg & Andrews, 2004) and challenge those through testimonios (Huber, 2009) and how students are positioned in terms of race, disability, language, gender in and through emotionality, using DisCrit as a way to analyze the intersecting positionalities and power in classrooms (Annamma et al., 2018). Specifically, as our work focuses on Latinx students, we hope to add to the literature on how Latinx students negotiate and challenge deficit framings in mathematics (Levya, 2016; Zavala, 2014).

In this presentation, we will describe our collective process to describe complex embodiment in mathematics, as well as methodologies that we are developing to center emotion, embodiment and intersectionality in mathematics identity literature. For example, our research collaborative itself, with members from different educational fields and with multiple positionings around race and disability, is part of our strategy. We also center emotion in our analysis process, as well as working to find new methods to better understand emotion and embodiments in student and teacher participants.

Authors

• Rachel Lambert, University of California - Santa Barbara

• David Isaac Hernandez-Saca, University of Northern Iowa

• Rebeca Mireles-Rios, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Katherine Lewis, University of Washington - Seattle