March 2024

March was a busy month in terms of public events, seminars and publications.

Epistolary Archives and Sensibilities:

Between the Personal and the Scientific in Women Mathematicians’ Correspondence

photo © Maria Tamboukou

Amongst the comments and questions I received I very much value the following comment from a teacher of mathematics in Manchester, which confirms my argument about the importance of memory work in prefiguring the future of women in mathematics, but also of the importance of the agonistics of knowledge and learning:

On March 5, 2024 I gave the annual lecture for the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies, an event that was co-orgaised with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library of the University of Manchester. It was a public event where I communicated the epistemological and methodological approaches of my research with women mathematicians' letters and correspondences.

Over the years I have spoken in some very nice venues, but the Rylands Library was something different. In my lecture, I offered the notion of epistolary sensibility as a methodological move that I have deployed in conducting archival research, but also as an epistemological lens through which I have read, understood and analysed women mathematicians’ letters in Europe during the early modern period and beyond.

I am thinking about the young girls in our classrooms and how they should know about theses women. And as a mathematician myself , I remember when I announced that I wanted to study mathematics, my father said ‘it is too hard for women', I was enrolling the day after obviously [...] young girls in our classrooms should know about these things, also because we think that mathematics has been, well we talk about the elegance of it and how mathematics looks nice and it looks neat and actually it’s not born that way, the mathematicians struggle to achieve that elegance and actually it’s messy with their deletions and I really liked when you talked about this.

The agonistics of knowledge and learning

On March 6, I was very excited to receive the news that my paper 'Hidden in the Archive of Gender and Science: the agonistics of knowledge and learning' was published on-line first and open access in the History of Education. As already noted above, we were discussing about it in the annual lecture of the John Rhylands Libbrary, with some very interesting interventions from teachers of mathematics about their stance towards encouraging girls.
Below are some highlights from the paper:

Agonism is an important notion in the philosophical thought of Hannah Arendt, underpinning her configuration of action and politics. But as its etymological root in the ancient Greek word ἀγών [struggle] indicates, agon does not only denote affirmative action towards achievement, creation and recognition, but it is also about contestation, dissent and opposition, a component that is prevalent in other approaches to agonism in theories of the political. In thus transposing the Arendtian conceptualization of agonism as affirmative contestation in the field of education as learning, what I find crucial is its entanglement with the boundlessness, contingency and unpredictability of action.

It is precisely the wilderness of the world of science and mathematics and the unpredictability of educational and pedagogical actions that I have found myself sensing while immersed in the study of archival documents that revolve around women's science education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In using the Arendtian notion of agonism as a lens through which I have read these documents, my suggestion is that the agonal spirit emanating from them challenges prevalent discourses around exceptionality in real and fictional constructions of the woman mathematician and scientist then and now. Thus, instead of putting women mathematicians and scientists on pedestals, glorifying their rare talents and skills and hence separating them from 'the multitude', we should better study and examine the minutiae of the agonistic processes they entered in grappling with the world of science and mathematics — an on-going struggle that reaches our own days in various modalities and forms.

Emilie du Châtelet, Exposition abrégée du système...de Newton, source

Rhythmanalysis and the echo of the subject

On March 18, 2024 I presented my work on rhythmanalysis in the Research Symposium Series, 'Exploring Rhythmanalysis as a method' organised by the Temporalities, Rhythms & Complexity Lab of the Institute SunChronos in Geneva Switzerland.

It was great to be part of an international and transdisciplinary community of rhythm scholars and practitioners and present my ideas of how I deploy rhythmanalysis in engaging with women mathematicians' auto/biographical, literary and philosophical writings, particularly focusing on the notion of 'the echo of the subject' and connections between music and inscriptions of the self.

At the end of the session and before the Q&A, participants were asked to bring about memories of music inscription of themselves in the form of telling a story or singing a song and here are some rhythmic reflections:

'Tainted Love' by Soft Cell - Marc Almond ... I was studying at Leeds Poly and I was at school in the early eighties. It was a time of wondering about by future and desire to go to art school. Also associating with cultures that were counter to the dominant music world. Three weeks ago I learnt a[...] about the impact of Leeds Arts schools on the electronic music of the 80s. There was also a film of travelling through a nihilistic brutalist building long corridor that I recognised from being a student. Memory entangles all these experiences together with a sense of connection and wonder.

Rap music in french (my mother tongue, the only one I really understand in songs) fascinate me for its density and capacity of playing words, of narrative, and of poetry. Often, my days of teaching go alongside with pieces of song, in my "mental jukebox". And I often listening to rap to prepare me, as if this way I could have this Energy and art of speaking. Some songs have been real pilgrimages for me for months or year as this freestyle (at leat one listening a Week for one or two years between 21 and 23)