November 2024

Symposium 2025 preparations

In November, I was immersed in finalizing the provisional programme for Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies, a symposium that will take place in London on 12 May 2025. Timed to coincide with the International Day for Women in Mathematics, this event marks the final year of the project and gathers work that interrogates how mathematics and narrative are lived, remembered, theorized—and at times, refused. The call for papers, which closed over the summer, drew a remarkable range of responses from scholars based in the UK, France, Greece, Sweden, and the United States. Together, they contribute to an expanding body of inquiry into the entanglements of gender, number, and narration.

The symposium is conceived in the spirit of the old schola—not as a formal conference, but as a day devoted to thinking together. It offers a space for sustained, generous, and sometimes unexpected exchanges: a sequence of encounters rather than a series of performances. The aim is not to arrive at conclusions but to cultivate a mode of scholarly attention attuned to resonance, hesitation, and relation.

Our shared point of departure is the question of how numbers and narratives co-constitute one another—not only in the production of scientific knowledge, but in the shaping of subjectivities, political imaginaries, and aesthetic forms. Reading through the abstracts, I was struck less by disciplinary coherence than by a shared attentiveness to what resists being counted: the traces of memory that slip beyond calculation, the speculative gestures that exceed the measured time of developmental logics, the affective labour that never quite adds up. Across divergent approaches, a subtle undercurrent of refusal runs through the programme: refusal of mathematics as mastery, refusal of gender as static variable, refusal of time as linear, progressive, or universally shared.

Collectively, the abstracts unsettle what it means to “do history” in the context of mathematics, gender, and education, while elaborating a richly layered feminist genealogy of automathographies. Valerie Walkerdine’s keynote reflects powerfully on who gets to count—and how counting is lived—through a decades-long longitudinal study of class, race, and mathematical achievement. Her address sets the tone for the symposium’s core questions: how subjectivities are shaped through mathematical encounters, how institutional practices exclude while appearing neutral, and how autotheory—personal reflection as method—might disrupt universalist epistemologies. Anna Chronaki’s invited talk builds on these themes, linking feminist critiques of science with speculative imagination. She positions mathematics not only as a site of exclusion but also of generative possibility, where gender and science are continually co-configured. Her emphasis on material-discursive assemblages and feminist STS opens the field to a radical reimagining of what mathematics can become.

Several contributions explore how women mathematicians write themselves into and around mathematics—through memoirs, letters, Wikipedia entries, and speculative fiction. Odile Chatirichvili’s analysis of autobiographies and digital representations (REVIMA) and Pasxalina Chatzi Bei’s study of life narratives among minority women scientists foreground narrative as a site of resistance and self-fashioning under conditions of marginalisation. These automathographies—often fragmented or mediated by collective memory—resonate with the symposium’s investment in hesitation, textual play, and generative incompletion.

Paul Ernest and Lovisa Sumpter offer critical mappings of the ideological terrain of mathematics: from the ‘great man’ narrative to myths of objectivity and effortlessness. Their interventions echo Walkerdine’s early work and underscore how mathematics upholds masculinist and classed ideologies. Sumpter’s historical lens, attentive to overlooked contributors, aligns with the project’s archival impulse and its challenge to who gets inscribed in disciplinary memory.

Papers by Abigail Taylor-Roth, Pasxalina Chatzi Bei, and Bruna Letícia Nunes Viana bring crucial intersectional perspectives. Taylor-Roth interrogates the militarised and capitalist underpinnings of mathematical knowledge production, while Nunes Viana draws on Butlerian theory to explore gender performativity in Brazilian higher education mathematics—mapping the gendering of space, bodies, and affect in the university. These papers move from critique to praxis, asking not only what mathematics is, but what it could become.

The project’s central concern—how numbers and narratives shape one another—echoes through each contribution. Whether through empirical studies, theoretical provocations, or narrative analyses, the abstracts illuminate mathematics not simply as something done, but as something lived: often at the threshold of inclusion and erasure. Together, they advance a feminist genealogy not as linear inheritance but as a network of ruptures, resonances, and refusals.

The symposium is thus more than a showcase of research. It stages an encounter between method, memory, and materiality. It insists that automathographies are not marginal curiosities but vital texts—through which the histories, epistemologies, and futures of mathematics might be reimagined. What binds the day together is less a single theme than a shared disposition: toward interruption, entanglement, and the possibility of otherwise. The symposium does not aim to conclude a conversation, but to open one—to hold space for unruly genealogies of gender, mathematics, and politics. It is an invitation to think with the fragmentary, the unfinished, and the relational; to stay with the speculative textures of what it means to write, count, and resist.

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