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In my previous work, I criticised studies within the sociopolitical turn for disavowing a comprehension of schools as places of capitalist production. Here, I extend this critique to what is being flagged as a new turn in educational research. I am referring to biosocial research, particularly in the way it is coupled with new materialist and more than human philosophies in the work of Elizabeth de Freitas. I use elements from Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore the concomitances between mathematics and capitalism, showing how both mathematics and capital need to suture the subject in order to thrive. Biosocial research epitomises this drive towards automation and totality, and, notwithstanding de Freitas' attempts to rescue it from the logic of control, I will argue that agent-centred intentions dismiss the underlying workings of capital as a real abstraction. I do so by engaging with elements of Deleuze's philosophy, showing how the more than human frame in which de Freitas' biosocial research rests contradicts her own perception of how biosocial research can be rescued for inclusive purposes.

The idea that mathematics is needed for our mundane everyday activities has raised the question of how people deal with mathematics outside the school walls. Much has been written in mathematics education research about the possibility of transferring knowledge from and into school. Whereas the majority of this literature commends the possibility of transfer, thus assuming both the desirability of transfer and the importance of school mathematics for the professional and mundane lives of individuals, I am interested in developing an ideology critique on the beliefs underpinning the research on this issue. It will be argued that the use-value attributed to school mathematics disavows its value as part of a political and economic structure, which requires school mathematics to perform other roles than the one related with utility. This critique will be illustrated through the exploration of a typical transfer situation between school and workplace.

This article discusses how the constant pressure for young people to optimise themselves, to become the masters of their lives and to enjoy life to the full, instead of leading towards a new empowered citizenship, can also be experienced as an existential burden. It does so by engaging with the most recent research literature on youth studies concerning the agency/structure debate, which will be illustrated with results from a European project on youth participation. This literature will be discussed against the background of Hegelian philosophy, where it will be argued that structure is not as much a negative entity constraining people’s lives but a necessary feature of agency. The article finishes with a short exploration of Greta Thunberg’s political engagement, as an example of what universal politics could mean amidst a world permeated by identity politics.

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the epistemology and philosophy of ethnomathematics, and to debate its educational implications. It begins by identifying in recent literature two categories of criticism of ethnomathematics: epistemological, related with the way ethnomathematics positions itself in terms of mathematical knowledge; and pedagogical, related to the way ethnomathematical ideas are implicated in formal education. After a description of both of these categories, the pedagogical implications of ethnomathematics are considered by means of confronting the criticisms of recent research in the field. Ethnomathematics research conceives its pedagogical implications in different ways, some of them contradictory. Such contradictions are related with the societal role of school, with the idea that we can \"transfer\" knowledge from one setting to another and the tendency to reduce ethnomathematics to a ready-to-apply \"tool\" for the school-learning of mathematics. The author discusses the first two criticisms in the light of recent research concerned with the social and political dimensions of mathematics education. Concerning the latter, a typical case of an ethnomathematical research study looking at bringing local knowledge into school in the name of promoting diversity is analyzed. It is the author's contention that ethnomathematical research runs the risk of conveying an idea of culture where the Other is squeezed from its otherness. The article concludes by arguing that a deeper theoretical discussion is needed in the majority of the research currently done in ethnomathematics so that well-intentioned actions do not end up having a result opposite to their aims.

The issue of subjectivity has recently occasioned a lively discussion in this journal opposing socioculturalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. By confronting Luis Radford's cultural theory with Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, Tony Brown sought to show the limitations of socioculturalism. This article takes advantage of that discussion to develop a critique of Radford's theory of objectification, taken as an exemplary sociocultural theorization of the teaching and learning of mathematics. It does so by extending the criticism made by Brown at the level of the subject, namely by showing what is lost in socioculturalism when it reduces the Hegelian notion of dialectics to a relation between constituted entities; but mostly by exploring the possibility opened by contemporary theory to posit the discussion around subjectivity in the political. While socioculturalism assumes the possibility of a synthesis between person and culture thus making education possible, it will be argued that a theory which assumes the impossibility of education is in a better position to, on the one hand, conceptualize the resistance of many towards the learning of mathematics, and on the other hand, to address the ongoing political failure in achieving the desired goal of \"mathematics for all\".

This text, occasioned by a critical reading of Tony Brown's new book Mathematics Education and Subjectivity, aims at contributing to the building of a sociopolitical approach to mathematics education based on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Slavoj Žižek's philosophy. Brown has been bringing into the field of mathematics education the work of these two scholars, and his work has been important in understanding the cultural dynamics of school mathematics. This article highlights the limitations of Brown's use of Lacanian theory and outlines a framework to understand students' learning not in terms of the inherent properties of mathematics but in terms of the role this school subject plays within political economy.

We discuss contemporary theories in mathematics education in order to do research on research. Our strategy consists of analysing discursively and ideologically recent key publications addressing the role of theory in mathematics education research. We examine how the field fabricates its object of research by deploying Foucault's notion of bio-politics—mainly to address the object \"learning\"— and ¿ izek's ideology critique—to address the object \"mathematics\". These theories, which have already been used in the field to research teaching and learning, have a great potential to contribute to a reflexivity of research on its discourses and effects. Furthermore, they enable us to present a clear distinction between what has been called the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education research and what we call a positioning of mathematics education (research) practices in the Political.

Social and political turns in mathematics education research have brought into the field postmodern theorisations that researchers have been using to dismantle traditional philosophies of mathematics, to posit mathematics in the sociocultural terrain, and to spell out the role mathematics has in school exclusion. Sociopolitical perspectives constitute a privileged field of research to address the influence of economy on mathematical achievement. However, instead of investigating the role of economy in students’ achievement, sociopolitical studies have been contributing to a disavowal of the economic dimension of school mathematics. This paper synthesises a set of investigations carried out by the author in the last 5 years endeavouring to posit mathematics education in the political and economic spectrum of our time. It takes advantage of the contemporary combination of Hegel’s dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marx’s critique of political economy, carried out by Slavoj Žižek, to develop a critique of the way research within the so-called ‘sociopolitical turn’ deals with the issue of equity; and marks out the contours of mathematics education’s ideological belonging.

Research in ethnomathematics has become predominantly focused on \"local cultures\" and non-scholarized forms of mathematics, thus becoming less a critical reflection on the sociopolitical roots of academic mathematics and the place it occupies in the popular imagination and in schooling, and more of a learning device. Such a development of ethnomathematics research is problematic and, in some instances, contradictory. In this article, I briefly point out some of the problems I see in the educational implications of ethnomathematics, and suggest a political reading of mathematics education that shows the limitations of culture when confronting the economic role of schooling.