ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Chinese Australian and Chinese Canadian young people negotiate opportunities and tensions behind their mathematics learning. For these young people, learning mathematics has become an embodied disposition formulated through primary pedagogic work and domestic socialisation, and a racialised stereotype imposed through secondary socialisation within school, work, media, and everyday spaces. When faced with the entanglement of the Chinese body, Chineseness, and mathematics achievement, some participants engage in subordination to the symbolic violence of doxic racial stereotype. Some take advantage of the doxa and impose ‘flipped symbolic violence’ on the cultural dominant who produces the doxa. In either way, they contribute to the reproduction of the racialised stereotype in the field of doxa. However, some participants neither always take their cultural dispositions for granted nor easily submit to external impositions. Rather, they reflectively make meaning out of their body, identity, and achievement while also responsively negotiating social structures. They walk through an embodied, dynamic process of socialisation that enculturates them into a disposition of resilience to the doxic racialised stereotype in fields of primary and secondary socialisation. The chapter unveils complexities and subtleties behind mathematics learning of Chinese diaspora. It complements and complicates statistical evidence on the ‘math-competence’ of Chinese students and students of Chinese descent. It calls for a sociology of resilience and a worldview of cosmopolitanism to respond to structural constraints in diasporic, multicultural contexts.
