Critical Realism and CSP as Sociopolitical Tools for STEM Pan-Disability Culture and Intersectional Subalternity Empowerment

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

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to interrogate in a comparative manner the suitability of critical realism/relational sociology (especially as espoused by Donati, 2011) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP, e.g., Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017) as sociopolitical tools for the recognition, promotion and horizontal legitimation of multiple knowledges in mathematics education. In particular, the paper seeks to place maximum emphasis to elevate subaltern intersectional knowledges and cultural repertoires (Waitoller & Thorius, 2016), that is, marginalized intersectional learning and emancipatory inclusive equity spheres unique to students at the intersection of race and disability (Annamma et al., 2013), along with other modalities of marginalizing matrices of hierarchy, i.e., gender/queerness (Annamma, 2018; Ben-Moshe, 2020; Obourn 2020), class, language/xenophobic ideologies, religious affiliations or lack thereof, and so forth.

In addition, in conjunction to STEM exclusionary processes toward students with disabilities, the paper uses conceptual categories associated with what Tan and Kastberg (2017; see also, Authors, 2019) call “math of all,” as opposed to the proverbial “math for all” used in many educational contexts in terms of what amounts to little more than an equity propagandistic slogan. In doing so, it unmasks what Popkewitz (2004, 2014) calls “inscriptions” and “fabrications.” These are interrelated epistemological and curricular mechanisms. They are aimed specifically to legitimize supremacist/normalizing mathematical claims developed and disseminated through various forms of authority pontification for the perpetuation of those very modes of exclusion which are deliberately targeted at students with disabilities and/or anybody who does not feet the supremacist and postracial colonizing constructs they aim to preserve as fundamentally ingrained in the institutional ethos of generalized schooling cultural practices.

Author

• Alexis Padilla, Independent Scholar