Strangers in Paradise? The construction of mathematics as a male community of practice

Abstract

The study that I have been reporting in this book was, in part, attempting to answer two questions: Is the academic community of practice of mathematics recognisably defined? How might it look and feel different? In particular, I was concerned to know if women’s experiences within the mathematical community and their ways of coming to know mathematics were distinctive and, if so, in what ways. The term ‘community of practice’ was described in Wenger (1998). For Etienne Wenger, “living is a constant process of negotiation of meaning” (Ibid: 53, original italics), the purpose of which is to learn. The negotiation of meaning involves “the interaction of two constituent processes…participation and reification” (Ibid 52, original italics) and “their complementarity reflects the inherent duality of this process” (Ibid: 66). He described their relationship as “on the one hand, an intense involvement with the reificative formalisms of [the] discipline; and on the other, a deep participative intuition of what those formalisms are about” (Ibid: 67). He pointed out that:

One of the reasons why there appears to be no alternative to our mathematics is because we routinely disallow it. (Bloor, 1991, 180)