Abstract
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THINKING MATHEMATICS PEDAGOGY STRATIGRAPHICALLY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair
Simon Fraser University
pmikulan@sfu.ca, nathsinc@sfu.ca
Abstract
Recent theories of posthumanism and new materialism, have advanced important and sustained arguments in relation to global environmental crises. These theories share a commitment to de-centring the human and attending to the various, non-human material forces with which the human is entangled—thus offering a point of view from which ‘we’ can better appreciate our dependence on and within the environment. Claire Colebrook (2014b) has challenged these approaches by pointing to the hyper-humanism and active vitalism they entail, given that they frequently arise—at least in relation to issues such as climate change—from a concern with human life, and with the possibility of sustaining human life on the planet. What is needed, according to Colebrook is a mode of thinking that is “able to consider forces of composition that differ from those of man and the productive organism” (p. 100). In this paper, we will show that mathematics may be particularly well-suited to this endeavour. Drawing on Mikulan’s (2017) stratigraphic approach to pedagogy, we will propose some paths towards such a framing, one involving the embracing of non-sense, accident and singularity (see de Freitas & Sinclair 2014) and the other a refusal to tame the virtual through the metaphoric (see Châtelet 1993/2000).
