Heather Mendick

There is a burgeoning interest in the concept of identity within mathematics education research, with recent work suggesting that the interplay of identity and capital (cultural, social, and economic resources) offers a productive lens for understanding school students’ trajectories into, or away from, mathematics. This paper adds to understandings...

During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym's distinction be...

As ‘open’ and supposedly inclusive informal learning settings that participants visit out of interest and passion, there has been hope that makerspaces will democratize technology and challenge traditional gender patterns in engineering education. Passion for technology has, however, also been shown to be deeply intertwined with the masculinization...

CITATION: Walshaw, M., Chronaki, A., Leyva, L., Stinson, D. W., Nolan, K., & Mendick, H. (2017). Beyond the box: Rethinking gender in mathematics education research – Proposal for a symposium. In A. Chronaki (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th International Mathematics Education and Society Conference (MES9, Vol. 1, 184–188). Volos, Greece: MES9. ABSTRAC...

In this article, we develop critiques of the pipeline model which dominates Western science education policy, using discourse analysis of interviews with two Swedish young women focused on ‘identity work’. We argue that it is important to unpack the ways that the pipeline model fails to engage with intersections of gender, ethnicity, social class a...

In this paper, I take a sociological approach to understanding the under-representation of gender and physics. I argue that gender is something we do not something that we are. Thus, every aspect of our behaviour, including our engagement (or not) with physics becomes part of our performance of gender. I then use a brief historical analysis and an...

This chapter engages social research to explore how celebrity functions within young people’s lives. Countering public debates which position celebrity simplistically as pushing young people predictably along “good” or “bad” pathways, the chapter offers a conceptualization of celebrity as a resource within young people’s “identity play” through whi...

In this article, we explore the ways that contemporary young masculinities are performed and regulated through young people’s relationship with celebrity. We address the relative paucity of work on young men’s engagements with popular culture. Drawing on qualitative data from group interviews with 148 young people (aged 14-17) in England, we identi...

In this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. We locate austerity as a discursive and disciplinary field and contribute to emerging feminist scholarship exploring how broader political and socio-economic shifts interact with cultural constructions of femininity and motherh...

In this article, we start from the problem of inequality raised by the existence of a class of celebrities with high levels of wealth and status. We analyse how young people make sense of these inequalities in their talk about celebrity. Specifically, we revisit Michael Billig’s Talking of the Royal Family, and his focus on rhetorical strategies th...

This article presents findings from the research project ‘The role of celebrity in young people’s classed and gendered aspirations’ (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council). Drawing on interviews with 148 young people in England, the project addresses concerns about the impact of celebrity culture on youth aspirations. The article prese...

Drawing on 24 group interviews on celebrity with 148 students aged 14-17 across six schools, we show that ‘hard work’ is valued by young people in England. We argue that we should not simply celebrate this investment in hard work. While it opens up successful subjectivities to previously excluded groups, it reproduces neoliberal meritocratic discou...

This thematic section emerged from two seminars that took place at Durham University in England in November 2013 and March 2014 on the possibilities for thinking through what a change movement towards slow might mean for the University. Slow movements have emerged in relation to a number of topics: Slow food, Citta slow and more recently, slow scie...

In this paper, we look at what engaging with psychoanalysis, through psychosocial accounts of subjectivity, has contributed to our struggles for legitimacy and security within our ways of knowing. The psychosocial, with its insistence on the unconscious and the irrational, features as both a source of security and of insecurity. We use three exampl...

This chapter engages social research to explore how celebrity functions within young people’s lives. Countering public debates which position celebrity simplistically as pushing young people predictably along “good” or “bad” pathways, the chapter offers a conceptualization of celebrity as a resource within young people’s “identity play” through whi...

In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for the...

In this article, we offer an empirical contribution to complement cultural analyses of social class-making in Reality Television (RTV). We draw on qualitative interviews with young people in England (aged 14–19). Analysing these discursively, we explore how young people take up, resist and rework discourses of ‘authenticity’ within RTV shows includ...

This paper looks at online representations of women and men in science, engineering and technology. We show that these representations largely re/produce dominant gender discourses. We then focus on the question: How are gender clichéd images re/produced online? Drawing on a discursive analysis of data from six interviews with web authors, we argue...

Both academic and vocational subject choices are gendered. For example, in most countries, young women are more likely than young men to opt out of studying physics, mathematics and technology; courses in care and beauty work are female-dominated while those in construction and manual trades are male-dominated. Since the 1970s second wave feminist...

High achievement, and in particular, the role of the academically diligent and successful ‘boffin’ or ‘geek’, are notably under-researched areas in the sociology of education. Issues around gender and other aspects of identity in relation to such pupils are particularly under-researched. In this Viewpoint article we draw on evidence from our recent...

In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered...

This book brings together scholars working in the field of mathematics education to examine the ways in which learners form particular relationships with mathematics in the context of formal schooling. While demand for the mathematically literate citizen increases, many learners continue to reject mathematics and experience it as excluding and excl...

In this chapter, we look at the interlinked discourses through which quality and equity are constructed as objects within current neoliberal education policy in England and at the consequences for teachers’ practice. We do this by carrying out a poststructural analysis of two sets of data: policy documentation and qualitative in-depth interviews wi...

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular c...

This paper makes both a critical analysis of some popular cultural texts about mathematics and mathematicians, and explores the ways in which young people deploy the discourses produced in these texts. We argue that there are particular (and sometimes contradictory) meanings and discourses about mathematics that circulate in popular culture, that y...

Teach First is an educational charity that places graduates to teach in ‘challenging’ schools for two years. It is marketed as an opportunity to develop employability while ‘making a difference’. In this paper, I examine the process of class reproduction occurring in this graduate employment scheme through examining the discourses used in Teach Fir...

This article provides an approach to understanding the widely acknowledged difficulties experienced by young people in the transition from pre-16 to post-16 mathematics. Most approaches to understanding the disenchantment with and drop-out from AS-level mathematics focus on curriculum and assessment. In contrast, this article looks at the role of r...

This article investigates the experience of individual learners who have been allocated learning support in the further education system in England. The particular focus is on interviewees’ constructions of their emotional and psychic experiences. Through the adoption of a psycho-social perspective, learners’ tendency to ‘idealise’ their learning s...

I was talking about my friend who was the maths geek. He came back this summer and he has got like the pi symbol and it's about an inch big tattooed on like the underside of his wrist. Everyone was telling me he had 'pi' and I was thinking, 'why has he got a pie tattooed on his wrist?' And I was thinking, 'what kind of pie would it be and why would...

Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and a Fear of Failure. By Carolyn Jackson. Pp. 176+xii. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education. 2006. £60.00 (hbk), £19.99 (pbk). ISBN 0335217710 (hbk), 0335217702 (pbk).

This paper draws on a research study into why more boys than girls choose to study mathematics. My starting point is that only four of the 43 young participants, and all of them male, self-identified as 'good at maths'. By reading these interviews as narratives of self, I explore the 'identity work' accomplished within their talk and within the tal...

This paper focuses on the ways in which many researchers working in the area of gender and mathematics make sense of their data. In particular, it is argued that their use of the oppositional framing, separation versus connection (and others, such as cognition versus affect and objective versus subjective), operates to fix difference, and so to fix...

In this paper I address the question: How is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? I draw on the findings of a qualitative research study involving interviews with 43 young people all studying mathematics in post-compulsory education in England. Working within a post-structuralist framework, I argue th...

Mathematics is a central and controversial part of the school curriculum. In the UK the New Labour government has introduced a variety of initiatives on mathematics education, with the stated aim of 'raising standards'. These include the National Numeracy Strategy, a project that dictates, not only what and how much maths should be taught to pupils...

Many people have mapped the boundaries of the 'social turn' in mathematics education. We do not want to push back the boundaries and so claim more territory for the social but to explore what sets those bounds and, drawing on Judith Butler's work, to imagine mathematics learning as always already social. We use data from 27 group interviews with 15...