ABSTRACT
It has become routine to tentatively suggest that people should no longer be willing to think of mathematics and mathematics education as far removed from culture, politics, and controversy. There is a long tradition of such scholarship (Zaslavsky, 1973a, 1973b; Pinxten, van Dooren, & Harvey, 1983; D’Ambrosio, 1985; Mellin-Olsen, 1987; Pinxten, van Dooren, & Soberon, 1987; Bishop, 1988a, 1988b; Ascher, 1991; Gerdes, 1992, 1994, 1996; Lerman, 1994; Skovsmose, 1994, 2004, 2011; Appelbaum, 1995; Baker, Clay, & Fox, 1996; Barton, 1996a; Powell & Frankenstein, 1997; Dowling, 1998; Eglash, 1999; Boaler, 2000; Martin, 2000; Adler, 2001; de Abreu, Bishop, & Presmeg, 2002; Gutstein, 2003; Kumashiro, 2009; Presmeg, 2007). Increasing attention to the effects of globalization, international economic and cultural proliferation, and a surge of migration and immigration leading to ever-diverse communities, has buttressed interest in cultural contexts of education in general, and mathematics education in multicultural communities in particular. Lerman (2000) dubbed this the “social turn” at the turn of the century. Yet, after at least 40 years of scholarship, as indicated by our brief representative sample of references, research and practice in mathematics education rarely moves beyond a surface suggestion that culture might be relevant to explore the nuances and complexities of mathematics and mathematics education as culturally constructed, embedded in cultural contexts, or as a component of socio-political institutions of power and authority.
