Abstract
By a politics of meaning I refer to the social, economic, cultural and religious conditions for experiencing meaning. I refer as well to the layers of visons, assumptions, presumptions and preconceptions that might construct something as being meaningful. By addressing different politics of meaning in mathematics education, I want to show how meaning becomes formatted. In order to do this, I provide a foreground-interpretation of meaning. The basic idea is to relate meanings and foregrounds, acknowledging that foregrounds are formed bya range of factors, as well as by the person’s experiences of such factors. Politics of meaning can be analysed with reference to sexism, racism, instrumentalism, the school mathematics tradition, critical mathematics education, and the banality of expertise.
