Abstract
This chapter is a deep outburst! This outburst first materialized as a presentation during a small international meeting of mathematics education researchers—DOME (Disorder of Mathematics Education), in early 2015 in Berlin. Mathematic education researchers committed to Critical Social Theory made up the core participants at the DOME. The central aim of this chapter is to propose some thoughts regarding our situationality as critical researchers and considering the position that our research occupies in the capitalist wile. The systematization of the presented arguments came as a result of a reflexion on my recent path as mathematics education researcher and educator, self-labelled as critical. The discourse begins with a brief introduction of some points of view over our choices, questioning our freedom, going through the political flows of our survival, and enquiring the role of our production, reproduction, and contradictions as critical researchers—passing to another stage as critical researchers.
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Notes
- 1.
The autonomous collective subject is like the anarchist concept of “self”: socially constructed, embedded in and constitutively social and without free will (an ideological idea, a myth without scientific basis) but with the natural right to freedom (a political concept), both socially and materially real. We cannot freely choose to speak a new language all of a sudden nor can we freely choose to fly without technological apparatuses (this would be the extreme implication of free will). We know, however, the difference between being in a prison (as institution ) and not being in a prison, even though we might want to speak about society metaphorically or even to depict it in theory as a prison.
- 2.
The big problem consists in a small act—to be with the other, which is in an excluded position in any context (political , economical, social, cultural, religious, etc.). This act has been considered as a personal affront to the apparent linearity in the societies where I was living/working and the treatment has been done based on the exclusion as I discuss in this chapter. In fact, this big problem, or this small act, can be considered as a break in the vicious cycle of the capital (the food of its own decadency), which maintains the victim’s condition so that it is the wide of who maintains it. The big problem here is that, with a small act, is possible to cut the big food.
- 3.
In the sense of Hausdorff space.
- 4.
A social and political local organization based on servo-contractual relations that appears on the socioeconomic relations in the Costa de Caparica, namely within the fishing and bairro communities . Both fishermen and the residents of the bairro community—the servants, have their home because the local government gave them (implicitly or explicitly). The right to a piece of land (house/apartment) comes from their labor relations, not always paid, with (1) the owners of the boats, (2) the owners of the agricultural lands, where the bairro is located, or even (3) the religious or public local institutions . These local owners can be understood as the feudal lords. The servants, when they need to transgress the limit of their houses, they need to pay (fines) both because the fishermen are fishing in places where the local government determines that they cannot as because the members of the bairro are walking in the city without a residence permit.
- 5.
Men, as beings “in a situation” find themselves rooted in temporal-spatial conditions, which mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on their own “situationality” to the extent that they are challenged by it to act upon it. Men are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it (Freire, 1970, p. 100).
- 6.
In his book Politics and the Other Scene (2002/2011), in his interview Europe is a dead political project (2010) or even in his discourses in Birkbeck Institute, UK ; during a summer course 2010 or in Bogazici University, Turkey; and during a public lecture called In Globalization and the Crisis of Cosmopolitan Idea.
- 7.
Caiçara is a Brazilian word, from the Tupi language family, to refer to the inhabitants of the coastal areas.
- 8.
It is the moment that an expanding body encounters other(s). In urban studies and architecture the “conurbation” can be defined as an expansion movement extensive urban area resulting from the expansion of several cities or towns so that they coalesce.
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Acknowledgments
Lia Laporta, Liz de Freitas, David Swanson, and Alexandre Pais … thank you very much for the discussion times! Special thanks to Hauke Straehler- Pohl for the warmth and professionalism with which he edited this work. This chapter was developed in the context of Post-Doctorate in Science Education, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under internal identification: SFRH/BPD/87248/2012.
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Mesquita, M. (2017). UrbanBoundariesSpace. Disturbing Choices and the Place of the Critical Research/Researcher in the Capitalist Wile. In: Straehler-Pohl, H., Bohlmann, N., Pais, A. (eds) The Disorder of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34006-7_18
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