Radical Reconfiguring(s) for Equity in Urban Mathematics Classrooms: Lines of Flight in Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom

Abstract

n Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom by Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair (2014), the authors call for a “radical reconfiguring” (p. 225) of mathematics education. Similarly, Barad (2012) argues that “theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world” (p. 207) and that putting new materialist and posthumanist theories to work in mathematics education could open up a space for this radical reconfiguring. This book review is based on our developing thinking about the use of theory and its possibilities within urban mathematics education. We situate ourselves in what de Freitas and Sinclair call a “stretchy space of continuous transformation” (pp. 90–91)—continuing to think and re-think issues like equity with this text, letting the words wash over us (St. Pierre, 2003), opening up and questioning urban mathematics education research. As two White women mathematics educators and emerging scholars in the field, we do not assert that theory alone or theory removed from practice can address the complex, prevalent, and long-lasting inequities present in mathematics education; however, we view theory in concert with practice as having potential to advance the field. de Freitas and Sinclair’s theories, which they use to question school mathematics in general, could be built upon and deployed to expose the problematic presence of White rationality (Martin, 2015) in urban classrooms. We encourage the reader to join us in this stretchy space and embrace the potentialities of the book as an as-