Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
This open panel asks how to narrate the histories, sociologies, and cultures of mathematics in ways that decenter dominant and hegemonic mathematical knowledges, practices, and institutions. As a form of knowledge, mathematics has been virtually defined by its assault on provincialization. It is, in many fundamental respects, a science of producing equivalences. Mathematics has, indeed, frequently been cast in the colonizing discourse of scientific modernity as a universal and unifying idiom, a means of compelling assent so secure as to transcend contexts, communities, and even species. Even the birds are counting these days.
Yet heterogeneity nonetheless abounds both within and between communities, and social studies of mathematics have recognized that heterogeneity as not just persistent but also the very condition of creativity, relevance, and living together mathematically. While historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others have long pursued the diversity of mathematical knowledge to various ends, this diversity has most often verged centripetally, articulating varieties of doing what is ultimately the same mathematics: ethnomathematical variations on a hegemonic theme that dissolve radical alterities, resistances, and provincialities.
We welcome proposals in any of the conference languages that insist on difference, dissent, and incommensurability in the heterogeneous worlds of mathematics and that explore the social, political, and epistemic stakes of provincialized mathematics or critically engage the production of equivalence across mathematical contexts and communities.
