Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román

Beyond Gap Gazing: How Can Thinking About Education Comprehensively Help Us (Re)envision Mathematics Education?

One cannot talk about equity these days without being politically correct. In fact, in the United States, “equity” has become an empty signifier manipulated in/through discourse (Dixon-Roman, in press). For example, although many use “the achievement gap” as an important call for school accountability around needed resources and additional support for marginalized students, (e.g., Education Trust 2005), such discourse has done little more than replace “the culture of poverty” in the latest of deficit frameworks. That is, while equity issues are becoming more mainstream in the mathematics education community, theoretical framings continue to reflect equality rather than justice, static identities of teachers and students rather than multiple, fluid, or contradictory ones (Gutierrez 2002, 2007; Martin 2009) and schooling rather than education. Whenever words like “quality,” “democracy,” and “equity” are used, we must first unpack what these terms mean and then examine who benefits from the definitions employed.

The Forms of Capital and the Developed Achievement of Black Males.

This study sought to examine the association of the various forms of capital on the developed achievement of Black males. As one of the richest longitudinal family economic data sets, the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics is used to estimate multilevel growth models of the math and reading achievement of Black males. Results suggest that the family’s permanent income has a large positive effect on the level of both math and reading achievement. Of the practices of social/cultural capital, parental emotional/cognitive stimulation, parents observing the classroom, and parental attendance at school events each had meaningful positive effects on the level of both math and reading achievement.

Urban Schooling and "Urban" Families: The Role of Context and Place

Conceptualizations of urban context and place in research, practice, and policy are relational, ranging from spatial dimensions to cultural practices of children, families, and communities in metropolitan areas. In this article, we focus on the inherent complexity of these conceptualizations and long-standing debates in education and social science research that label urban as a point of both identity and designation. We position urban context itself as a genre of thinking and imagining; challenges complicated in research, scholarship, and policy; practice and pedagogy; and public will and political rhetoric, influencing educational options and spanning issues from poverty to schooling.

Algo-Ritmo More-Than-Human Performative Acts and the Racializing Assemblages of Algorithmic Architectures

What happens when more-than-human digital acts tell us something about ourselves? This article examines the ways in which the algorithms of data analytics function in relation to other ontologies and assemblages and how they are shaping and forming our lives. Beginning by critically questioning the ontology of data, data are argued to be an assemblage that is materially and discursively produced from a multiplicity of apparatuses including sociopolitical relations of power and “difference.” The concept of algo-ritmo—that is, the repetition of data with alterity—is introduced as a way of understanding how the performative acts of the “soft(ware) thinking” of algorithms function. As the Spanish word for algorithm, algo-ritmo also situates the performative acts of algorithms as part of the relational and connected sociopolitical relations of racializing assemblages. Concluding remarks discuss both ethical implications and considerations for digital social inquiry.

Toward a hauntology on data: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages:

This article engages the philosophy of science of data, with a focus on the extent to which data are always already imbued with racializations.As Alexander Weheliye has argued, racializations are not to be reduced to race but rather is the sociopolitical process that hierarchizes and differentiates bodies producing the entangled by-products of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability among other formations of difference. The article leans on black literary feminist Sylvia Wynter’s work on science, blackness, and the human. In particular, the article works through her concepts of the cosmogonies of the human and the sociogenics of the fictively constructed models of Man. Cosmogonies, for Wynter, refer to the myths, narratives, and stories of the ontological origin of the human and the way in which this shapes the histor(icit)y of the human, including the later sociogenic formations of Western Man as the exclusive white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual rendering all other bodies as nonhuman. Wynter rejects cultural and biological explanations of race while still accounting for the ways in which the fabrications of race, as sociogenic, become ontogenic via the flesh. With her theories of power, inheritance, and the body, the article examines the ways in which data become haunted by sociopolitical relations of racialization. The article then points toward alternative futures by arguing for Wynter’s proposed Autopoietic Turn/Overturn praxis of science to critically examine the sociogenic codes toward reconstituting the human.

Cuban Youth Culture and Receding Futures: Hip Hop, Reggaetón and "Pedagogías Marginal".

Cuba finds itself at the centre of various discourses yet again, as publications such as The Economist and others debate the future of Cuban culture and society. While issues of economics, ideology and politics are fertile ground for discussion, they do not encompass the totality of such a conversation. The authors argue that critical to the conceptualisation of the Cuba of tomorrow is an awareness of Cuban youth cultures, the multiplicity and ideations of those cultures and the role that hip hop and reggaetón play in affording an alternative spaces for self-expression, critical dialogue, a fashioning of the what is to come and the receding futures of Cubas tomorrow.

The computational turn in education research: Critical and creative perspectives on the digital data deluge

In his exceptional survey of big data methods in the social sciences, Kitchin (2014) describes the current state of affairs as a ‘data deluge’. Diluvian metaphors of flood and deluge are frequently used in reference to current computational culture – we surf the internet, follow streams and flows, and navigate through a near infinite sea of data. There are challenges and opportunities for researchers in the social sciences as they delve into this deluge. The impact on education research can already be felt in the digital datafication of life and learning, and there is a growing need for research on how big data and algorithmic methods are shaping the questions and aims of education more generally. This collection of five articles offers important critical analyses and creative options for education researchers working within this brave new world of live data and calculated publics. We – at least in the affluent north – seem immersed in digital technologies, exponential rates of data production, and market-based technocratic governance. The global proliferation and reach of data mining and software analytics is becoming ever more ubiquitous. New fields of inquiry such as software studies have recently attempted to address the socio-material nature of the computational turn, analysing the ‘data revolution’ as a cultural and ontological phenomenon, and exploring computational reconfigurations of knowledge, subjectivity, and the social (de Freitas, Dixon-Román, & Lather, 2016; Clough, 2016; Kirby, 2011; Latour, 2012; Manovich, 2013; Nakamura, 2012; Ruppert et al., 2013; Weheliye, 2014). Each of the articles in this journal issue is working on the forefront of this

Regenerative Capacities: New Materialisms, Inheritance, and Biopolitical Technologies in Education Policy

ABSTRACT Inheritance and social reproduction have been widely theorized and studied concepts in the social sciences. In theories of social reproduction a focus on social position and identity is assumed; a focus on moving from one position to another at the cost of overlooking the rich, and arguably more important, movement, process, and flow in between. Turning toward new materialisms for theoretical insight, this article points toward an alternative post-humanist perspective. Leaning on Massumi (2002) and Puar (2007), the author asserts that expanding the analytical focus to include the movement and process of biopolitical capacity will further sharpen the (new) materialist analysis of force and power relations, what Puar refers to as regenerative capacities. It is through the employment and performative force of biopolitical technologies in education policy, the author concludes, that enables the surveilling, managing, and demarcating of regenerative capacities that constrain the movement, process, and potentialities for, and of, social change.