Urban Mathematics Education Research

As Foucault’s ironic approach to history is to suggest that looking at our past can help us to change the future, I contend that connections make the best disruptions. To wit, I introduce citation networks to make connections between articles and citations as a way of disrupting assumptions about what has been and can be done in the name of mathematics education research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce citation networks, a novel method for identifying field connections, and a theory of spatiality that deploys the metaphors of bubbles and foams to imagine disruptions. After introducing the method and theory that guide this investigation, I introduce and describe the foams of the research published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education and Educational Studies in Mathematics during the 2010s. In doing so, I show what topics of inquiry constitute the dominant research foci of our field, or at least of our field as it is published in these mainstream mathematics education journals. Later, I read these maps with a critical lens towards the foci to discern what is marginalized and excluded, namely the urban. This research builds on earlier work that names the ghettoization of urban mathematics education research and provides a critical interrogation of the ways that urban research is marked and marginalized within dominant mathematics education research journals. I conclude by situating the role of the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education as a place to blow bubbles, a place to reconfigure what we can see, say, think, and do in the name of (urban) mathematics education research.