This is a call for articles for a special edition of Educational Insights, www.educationalinsights.ca an online, international, peer-reviewed, education journal based at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

The title, Performing the Sign: mathematics, democracy and the arts, is intended to incite a range of responses to themes created by the constitutive relationship between mathematics, democracy and the arts. The multiple significations and interpretations created through the performance of the words in the title in relationship to each other and to discourses in the social domain open up and signal possibilities of engagement with critical theoretical ideas and innovative textual productions.

Our intention is to publish articles that readers may find evocative and provocative. It is hoped that these articles will elicit novel perspectives, thereby contributing to understandings within mathematics education, curriculum studies, cultural studies, and/or arts-based or infused inquiry, teaching and learning. The articles may employ ideas and tenets from semiotic theory, performance theory, critical theory, contemporary socio-cultural and political theories, to name a few, and may be interdisciplinary or integrated in approach.

Fig 58.—Mathematician Monks; one teaching the Globe, the other copying a Manuscript.— After a miniature of the Romance of the "Image of the World."—Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.—National Library, Paris http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd--12064098/ Mathematician_Monks_One_Teaching_the_Globe_the_Other_Copying_a_Manuscript.htm

Possible focus areas and questions could be:

•  How might mathematics, with its “high symbolic content,” act as a discourse of power, oppression and/or possibility, and what might the role of the arts be(come) in providing a democratic face to mathematics? What assumptions might be troubled about mathematics, its relationship, if any, to democracy, and the alienation of the arts through the dominance of the mathematical sciences in schools and society? How might technology perpetuate or disrupt the status quo on this?

•  What role might the arts play in contesting and addressing some of the undemocratic and hegemonic mathematics education practices in schools, or might some of the advocacies of the arts in this role be ‘simplistic’? What significations and performances of the ‘body’ and/or of ‘place’ have metaphorical or literal significance for mathematics, science and arts practices in various contexts?

http://www.skidmore.edu/campus/college_relations/intercom/020412/news/images/monks.jpg

•  How might mathematics act as an over-determined signifier of how we have chosen to construct and live in society? How might that shape the way we value the arts, and how does this relate to our understandings or significations of democracy in Western society, or the global context, for example?

•  What historical or contemporary role does religion or spirituality play in the multiple relationships between mathematics, democracy and the arts? How might ecological or poetic ways of knowing provide insights into some of these relationships? What critical philosophical issues arise in the conceptual landscape of these various rationalities, particularly with regard to education and educational research?

•  How does race, gender, ability, language difference, culture or creed work contextually and intersubjectively to perform particular realizations of ‘scientific’ or ‘artistic’ practices? Are these constructed binaries problematic, and if so, why? How might we call forth ‘the soul’ into educational practices, especially with regards mathematics teaching, and can the arts play a role in this? What are the signs of a democratic and soulful educational practice?

These are only a very few suggestions intended to invite dialogue and provide some ideas that may be addressed in the articles, but there is scope to attend to many others. The editors at Educational Insights welcome novel articles that are thought-provoking, critical, and cutting-edge in theoretical approach and design.

Please submit articles for consideration to Dr. Dalene Swanson, dalene@interchange.ubc.ca, and Graham Giles, grahamgiles@shaw.ca by February 15, 2008. Some articles will be selected for a book publication after the release of the journal issue. Authors of these will be invited to contribute their article as a chapter in a collated book by the same title as the special edition.