EDITORS' CORNEROPINION: ‘Steeped in socio-political context, STEM spaces, and by extension, mathematics, perpetuate systems of oppression that privilege who is white, cis, male, and straight’
Move over underwater basket weaving – two math scholars are going further and asking: what if we made math gay?
And of course they did it with taxpayer dollars.
The International Society of the Learning Sciences recently published a three-page academic paper discussing an undergraduate course on the “queering of mathematics” through weaving.
As disclosed at the bottom of the paper, the research came via a National Science Foundation grant. The NSF (i.e. taxpayers) spent $1,750,000 on the award between 2021-23.
Curiously, the grant says nothing about “queering.” Rather, the summary states the project “will interweave iterative Design-Based Research with periodic experimental research experiments to test the efficacy of the robotic loom designs and course materials for undergraduate learning of interdisciplinarity and collaborative computing.”
The paper looked at “the design and implementation of a queering of mathematics in the context of a 10-week, elective undergraduate class in Southern California, bridging mathematics, weaving, and robotics.”
Both authors, University of Southern California Professor Nickolina Yankova and University of California Irvine Professor Kylie Peppler (pictured) cite their own work in the short paper.
The pair wrote:
Building on previous work which derived design goals for a queering of mathematics (Yankova, 2024), this study traces the design and implementation of such a queering with new tools and materials toward disrupting mathematics spaces as gendered, fixed, neutral, and reinforcing a binary. Situated in the context of an undergraduate interdisciplinary course at the intersection of robotics, mathematics, and weaving, this study asks: How do we design a queering of mathematics that ruptures the binary with new tools and materials?
Elsewhere they write: “Though often presumed to be domestic, women’s work, craft (e.g., knitting, crocheting, weaving) and the production of artifacts have shown to be inherently mathematical (e.g., Peppler et al., 2022; Thompson, 2020).”
The course was a success, according to the professors. “Students’ engagement with materials-to-queer-with scaffolded a deeper understanding of math across contexts and as a space that can rupture long-held binary oppositions (e.g., right way vs. wrong way, simple vs. complex; theory-driven vs. applied, etc.),” they wrote in the findings section.
It is important to go beyond the binary of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to math, the professors said. (One wonders how they grade assignments).
“Conventional mathematics spaces paint a divide between right and wrong, and other adjacent oppositions, often eliminating notions of complexity and reinforcing a binary,” the professors wrote. “Yet embracing a multiplicity of approaches and failure as an encouraged outcome and a productive part of the learning process promises to unsettle present inequities.”
Unfortunately, the only thing that was truly unsettled was the prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
MORE: UMinn PhD wins grant to develop ‘queering Europe’ course
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: University of California Irvine Professor Kylie Peppler next to a weaving loom; University of California Irvine; Brendan Hunter/Getty Images Signature