Research Symposium

The symposium is free of charge; however, spaces are limited. To secure your participation, please send an email to m.tamboukou@uel.ac.uk  including a brief statement of interest and a short bio. Registration will remain open until April 20, 2025.

Symposium Provisional Programme

9.00-9.15  Registration, coffee

9.15-9.30  Welcome and salutation

Prof. Wendy Thomson, Vice Chancellor of the University of London

Lucy Evans, Head of Collections, Senate House Library

9.30-10.00  Prof. Maria Tamboukou: Numbers and Narratives: the end or the beginning?

10.00-10.45  Keynote, Prof. Valerie Walkerdine

                     Do women count? Yet?

10.45 -11.00  Coffee break

11.00-11.45  Invited talk

Dr Brigitte Stenhouse, Open University, UK

Embracing Nature in Mathematical Formulae: The roles of mathematics in the life and works of Mary Somerville (1780-1872)

11.45-12.15  Prof. Lovisa Sumpter, Stockholm University, Sweden

The women who didn’t count

12.15-12.45  Dr Odile Chatirichvili, Université de Toulouse, France

‘To talk of many things’ in the feminine: a study of social and narrative representations of/by women mathematicians, from autobiographies to Wikipedia

12.45-14.00  Lunch networking, networking and display from the De Morgan Library, 

facilitated by Dr Karen Attar, curator of rare books and University Art at the Senate House Library 

14.00-14.45 Invited talk

Prof. Anna Chronaki, University of Thessaly, Greece and Malmö  University, Sweden

From the ‘woman’ question in mathematical sciences to the ‘mathematical’ matter for feminism

14.45-15.15  Bruna Leticia Nunes Viana, PhD candidate, Stockholm University, Sweden

The gendered subject of higher education mathematics

15.15-15.45  Prof. Paul Ernest, Exeter University, UK

 Ideological obstacles on women’s paths to mathematics

15.45-16.00  Coffee break

16.00-16.30   Pasxalina Chatzi Bei, PhD candidate, Democritus University, Greece.

Life narratives of women scientists of the Thracian minority in Greece. Their educational, professional and social activity

16.30-17.00  Abigail Taylor Roth, PhD candidate, University of Chicago, USA

From ‘Women’ to Structures of Power: Studying Militarism in Mathematics

17.00-17.30 Round table and closing remarks  

Committee for Women and Diversity in Mathematics, London Mathematical Society

Prof. Penny Jane Burke, UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and HE, University of Newcastle, Australia

Prof. Anna Chronaki, University of Thessaly, Greece, Malmo University, Sweden

Prof. Carrie Paechter-Nottingham University, UK 

Prof. Maria Tamboukou, Major Leverhulme Research Fellow, University of East London, UK

17.30- 18.30 Reception, drinks and networking

Abstracts

Keynote Lecture

Do women count? Yet?

Prof. Valerie Walkerdine

 ‘Counting Girls Out’ (1986) was a book written by myself and the Girls and Mathematics Unit. In that work we discussed research undertaken with two groups of British girls, one working and the other middle class, then aged 10, who were first seen at age 4. In this phase of the research, we interviewed girls and their teachers and gave them a maths test. What I am remembering from this phase is that some of the girls, who were in private schools, laughed at the test, which they found far too easy, having it seemed, often weekly tests in their schools. Conversely, hardly anyone in the state schools had taken tests. But more than this I remembered one girl, a black working class girl, top of her class, whose score was worse than the worst score from all the middle class schools. I was both angry and so upset because I knew that this would mean that her experience of success in an academic sense at least, would be short-lived. In the 1990s, we met the sample again, now 21, and saw the huge differences in life experience and educational attainment – not one working class young woman had attended university at the age of 18, though a tiny minority got there later. Now, aged 51, we are interviewing them again. This brought me up again, even more forcefully, to the question of ‘who counts’? In this presentation, I explore this question, bearing in mind also developments in autotheory, which confront us with what it means to theorise through our own lives and experience against the ‘grand universalising metanarratives of the Cogito.

Valerie Walkerdine is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University and currently holds a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship working on and updating data from a number of studies on British girls and women, including girls and maths, with a view to creating an archive and writing a book. She is also currently Visiting Professor in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences -LSE.

Invited talks

Embracing Nature in Mathematical Formulae: The roles of mathematics in the life and works 

of Mary Somerville (1780-1872)

Dr Brigitte Stenhouse

Much is known of Mary Somerville’s early life, thanks to her autobiography which was published posthumously in 1873. Throughout this book, Somerville situates mathematics as a formative influence in her life, one which brought her joy and religious affirmation. However, her account gives few details on how an 18th-century woman from a small Scottish village was able to become an accomplished mathematician, recognised as an expert in analytical mathematics throughout Europe and North America. This is especially pertinent as Somerville lived at a time when advanced mathematical texts were often expensive, or rare, and when women were usually unable to access the universities, libraries, or learned societies where such texts could be found. 

In this talk I will explore the substantial Mary Somerville Collection, held by the Bodleian Libraries and Somerville College, both of the University of Oxford, to piece together the traces of mathematics which remain, and build a clearer picture of what it meant for Somerville to be a mathematician in 19th-century Britain.

Dr Brigitte Stenhouse is a Lecturer in History of Mathematics at the Open University. Her PhD research analysed the mathematical works of Mary Somerville (1780-1872) and she has since researched the role of marriage in the building of mathematical careers. Stenhouse has previously held research positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto, and her research has been awarded the ICHM Montucla Prize and the IUHPST/DHST Dissertation Prize.

From the ‘woman’ question in mathematical sciences to the ‘mathematical’ matter for feminism

Prof. Anna Chronaki, University of Thessaly, Greece

and Malmö  University, Sweden

Sandra Harding back in the 80s discusses how the feminist critique of science evolves from reformist to revolutionary positions that require either to improve the existent science cultures or to transform them radically by questioning Western onto/epistemic foundations. Specifically, Harding (1986) argues how ‘the radical feminist position holds that the epistemologies, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the dominant forms of science are androcentric and mutually supportive’ and that ‘…gender symbolism, the social division of labor by gender, and the construction of individual gender identity have affected the history and philosophy of science’ (p. 9). In short, she argues that a new kind of knowledge-seeking inquiry is not only a matter of scientific method but, equally, a matter of feminist struggles toward requiring a radical critical rethinking of both science and gender. But how could this urge be addressed? Already, Valerie Walkerdine’s work strives to sensitize us for the importance to counter the dominance of certain material and discursive figurations including the ways they translate for the life of ‘women’ and ‘girls’ calling for the need to embrace alternatives (Walkerdine, 1989, 1997) and this work could align with the speculative thinking of science fiction writers like Ursula Le Guin (Le Guin, wikipedia; Chronaki, 2024). Taking the above into account, the present paper focuses on how specific thinkers in SSST (social studies in science and technology) and new-materialism like Haraway and Barad or Deleuze and Guattari affirm mathematical concepts as material/discursive components to con/figure and co/imagine the generative life of science(s) and gender(s) in ways that support us queer identitarian dichotomies and hierarchical relations.

Chronaki, Anna. 2024. The Masters: Speculative Assemblages of Mathematics Education as Enclosures and Commons with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Feminist Utopian Anarchism. Invited Lectures Vol lI: Proceedings of the 14th International Congress on Mathematical Education. October 2024, 119-149

Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. New York. Cornell University.

Le Guin, Ursula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography

Walkerdine, Valerie. 1989. Counting Girls Out: Girls and Mathematics. London. Falmer Press.

Walkerdine, Valerie. 1997. Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Anna Chronaki is Professor of Mathematics Education and her research on gender includes amongst several papers an edited volume on ‘Mathematics, Technology, Education: The gender perspective’ published in 2009 by the University of Thessaly Press and the translation of V. Walkerdine’s book ‘Counting Girls Out’ in 2013 along with an extensive introduction discussing why the book remains relevant beyond the UK context. Her current research emphasizes speculative thinking with Ursula le Guin’s feminist utopian politics and troubles the dominant presence of citizenship temporalities in mathematics education curricula and research.

Symposium Papers

Life narratives of women scientists of the Thracian minority in Greece. Their educational, professional and social activity

Pasxalina Chatzi Bei, PhD candidate

The Muslim minority of Thrace in Greece is the only recognized minority through the Treaty of Lausanne that was signed in 1923 between Greece and Turkey. Τhe role of minority women is the subject of research, which falls under the general issue of minority and women's issues. This paper is the starting point of the PhD research which seeks to investigate how minority women participate in education and become scientists in important and prestigious sciences, such as medicine, pharmacy, law and psychology. The research follows the qualitative methodology and through the biographical method and life narratives seeks to investigates what challenges minority women face due to their gender and minority background in the educational, professional/work and social sector, how the family environment supports them and how the rest of society (dominant and minority) reacts to their presence in the professional and social sphere.

Paschalina Chatzi Bei works in the Greek Secondary Education as a philologist. She is also graduate of the Program “Language Education for Refugees and Migrants” of the Hellenic Open University and recently is PhD candidate of the Department of Social Work of the Democritus University. Her research interests are related to gender, minorities, and education.

“To talk of many things” in the feminine: a study of social and narrative representations of/by women mathematicians, from autobiographies to Wikipedia

Dr Odile Chatirichvili

How are social representations and models influencing narrative forms, and vice-versa, in the case of a discipline which is at the same time extremely prestigious, arcane for the general public, and under-feminised? How can women mathematicians put pen to paper in order to tell their stories, and how can those stories tackle the subjects of under-feminisation and sexism of the mathematical community? Are there “feminine” or “feminist” ways to tell those (auto)mathographies? Are the new media and technologies of communication proper ways to alter the narratives?

In this paper, I intend to present the questions, methods, and first results of my postdoc project “REVIMA – Life Narratives of/by Women Mathematicians”. This work comes within the scope of the collective research project “Wiki-F – Wikipedia and Women Scientists” (Université de Toulouse, France) which examines the representation of women scientists on Wikipedia.

In collaboration with this team, my goal is to explore how life narratives of women mathematicians are made, arranged, and influenced, in a various range of contemporary material such as published auto/biographies and other forms of life testimonies, and including Wikipedia pages. To this end, I will use discourse analysis and implement lexicometric tools, as well as a sociological approach based on gender studies. The case of Sofia Kovalevskaia is already well documented; it is a starting point from which I will explore the cases of more contemporary women mathematicians (such as Michèle Audin, Julia Robinson, and Katherine Ollerenshaw whose autobiography lends its title to this paper).

Odile Chatirichvili is a postdoc scholar in the Université de Toulouse (Lerass, TIRIS Junior Fellowship Program). Her research focuses on the relationships between sciences (especially mathematics) and arts (especially literature). After a PhD in Comparative Literature about autobiographies of mathematicians, with a mainly masculine corpus, she works now on texts by and about women scholars. She has published several papers in academic journals and two chapters in collective books: Imagine Math 7 – Between Culture and Mathematics (ed. Michele Emmer and Marco Abate, Springer, 2020) and Le Monde des mathématiques (ed. Pierre-Michel Menger and Pierre Verschueren, Seuil, 2023).

Ideological Obstacles on Women’s paths to mathematics

Prof. Paul Ernest

There are a variety of ideological obstacles and obstructions on girls’, women’s, and others’  paths to success in mathematics. These include the following misconceptions.

1. Individualism –mathematics is learnt by oneself and researched individually

2. Competitive vs cooperative work. Maths learning and advancement benefit from individual competition.  

3.     ‘Great man’ theory – advances are made by individual geniuses (usually men) acting on their own without reference to those ‘on whose shoulders they stand’.

4.     Binary assumption – you either have or don’t have mathematical ability. Mathematics is only accessible to a talented and gifted few

5.     Effortlessness – for those with talent mathematics is effortless. Those who struggle don’t have ‘it’, leading to shame and the imposter syndrome

6. Objectivity of mathematics – it is a timeless and superhuman body of necessary knowledge. Any problems in encounters with mathematics are yours alone.

7. Neutrality and value-free nature of mathematics – it is a pure and abstract game set apart from human interests and values, beyond good and evil.

8. Achievement bias – boys and men achieve higher in mathematics than girls and women, and contradictory evidence is ignored.

9. There is a male or masculine mind – with separated values and cognition (Gilligan), systems thinking (Baron-Cohen) needed for success in mathematics

10.  The masculinity of mathematics is exclusionary for girls and women, and is antithetical to femininity - (mathematics ≠ feminine). 

This list is provisional, but these ideological assumptions are still widespread misconceptions throughout education and society. They disadvantage women and others including some ethnic minorities and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, while advantaging and privileging white middle class males. They uphold patriarchal structures and conceptions and are internalised by everyone, except those who manage to free themselves. For the privileged they are advantageous. But for woman and other minorities they are disadvantageous, eroding self-confidence and self-efficacy and inducing them to do the exclusionary work on and within themselves.

Paul Ernest is emeritus professor in mathematics education at Exeter University. He taught in a London comprehensive school in the 1970s and then lectured in mathematics and teacher education. His research explores questions at the intersections of philosophy, mathematics and education. His latest (edited) book is Ethics and mathematics education: The good, the bad and the ugly (Springer, 2024). Previous books include The Philosophy of Mathematics Education, Routledge, 1991, with 3000+ citations, and Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics, SUNY Press, 1998. He founded the open access Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal in 1990, located at  https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/groups/education/pmej/

The women who didn’t count

 Prof. Lovisa Sumpter

Throughout history, the history of mathematics has been ‘his story’, told from a view where pure mathematics is the gold standard. Little is known about the women who did not easily have access to higher education, especially the ones in other subjects that contributed to mathematical sciences.

According to Damarin’s (2008) research, little has changed in the field of mathematics for women since the 1970s and 80s. Writing about the intersection of gender and mathematics, she found, is not commonly influenced by feminist theories or interdisciplinary women's studies. This suggests that, in addition to utilizing feminist theories, we need to challenge the traditional view of what a mathematician looks like. For example, Athenaeus (200 AD) documented several successful women mathematicians in ancient Greece. Additionally, women in Babylon had the right to conduct business (per the Code of Hammurabi from 1755-1750 BC), and in ancient Egypt, women could own and inherit property, as well as engage in trade (e.g., Queen Nitocris around 2000 BC). Despite this, there remains a lack of representation of women in applied mathematics and mathematics education. This paper aims to challenge traditional views of mathematics and its practitioners, as well as what counts as a contribution to mathematical knowledge.

Lovisa Sumpter is a professor of mathematics education at Stockholm University. Her research interests are mathematical reasoning, gender, and affect. She has studied women's participation in mathematics, from preschool to PhD level.

From “Women” to Structures of Power: Studying Militarism in Mathematics

Abigail Taylor-Roth, PhD candidate

In order for mathematics to be an inclusive and welcoming environment for women, especially Black and brown women and queer folks, it must be a mathematics that is moving towards liberation. It is thus important to theorize the experiences of women in the mathematical sciences with the understanding that patriarchal structures and hegemonic masculinity are always intertwined with capitalism and militarism. I suggest that in order to think differently about women in mathematics, and, crucially, to create actual change in the field of mathematics, more attention must be paid to the militaristic and capitalist aspects of mathematical research. With this in mind, I present two alternative lenses for future work on women in mathematics which, taken together, allow for the necessary focus on capitalism and militarism. I suggest that we should use methods from feminist science studies to analyze structures of power in mathematics from a more holistic approach. And, simultaneously, we need to lean on and learn from political organizing efforts, specifically anti-militarism work in the sciences, to both develop concrete strategies for creating non-reformist change in the field and draw inspiration from the alternative and liberatory math-related spaces that people are already creating. In order to fight the deep-seated militarism in mathematics, both rigorous theorizations and strong praxis are necessary.

I am a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago, where I study feminist science studies and the history of modern mathematics. I am particularly interested in using methodologies from feminist STS beyond the life sciences and investigating the materiality of mathematics. I am always thinking and teaching about the role of mathematics and quantification in social movements and dreaming towards futures of police and prison abolition, anti-capitalism, and a science that is not rooted in militarism, extraction, and carceral technologies.

The gendered subject of higher education mathematics

Bruna Leticia Nunes Viana, PhD candidate

The production of mathematical knowledge is seen as fundamental to technological and scientific advancement, with universities being key sites for this knowledge production in modern society. However, the underrepresentation of girls in higher education mathematics highlights how dominant discourses impose a regime of truth where mathematics is associated with a specific type of masculinity, counting girls out (Walkerdine, 1998). My PhD research aims to investigate how gender is performed in higher education mathematics through different material-discursive configurations. From my theoretical perspective, gender is not a stable identity but a series of performances (Butler, 1999, 2004) — repetitive actions stabilized through their repetition within various institutions like families, schools, and universities. Therefore, I will engage with 10 university students who do not identify as male, across different stages of two mathematics programs in Sweden (fall 2024), since they experience the entanglement of higher education mathematics and other material-discursive practices while performing both gender and mathematics. Together with the students, I will discuss their pathways into the programs and how professors, peers, textbooks, etc., may produce (exclusionary) gendered norms. Scientific fiction will be used to foster students’ sensibility to notice different gendering processes during the investigation period, and special attention will be given to how students' bodies and emotions are constrained within those mathematics programs and how the physical space of the university (re)produce gendering processes. Preliminary findings will be presented at the conference on May 12th, 2025.

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge.

Walkerdine, V. (1998). Counting girls out: girls and mathematics. Falmer Press.

Bruna Leticia Nunes Viana is a PhD student in the field of Mathematics Education, at the Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University. Her interest areas are critical perspectives in mathematics education, feminist theories and critique of science, post-humanist approaches and research methodologies. Her undergraduate degree is in mathematics teacher education (Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul-Brazil), and her master’s thesis is in decoloniality and mathematics education in rural schools in Brazil.