My research draws on my extensive experience in education and the labour movement to focus on the theoretical, empirical and practical possibilities of formal education and informal community coalitions for social, political and economic liberation. I think with a variety of theory-driven qualitative methods—including ethnography and critical interaction analysis—to provide an account of learning as a sociopolitical process. As a learning scientist, I am thus predominantly occupied with the cultural politics of learning, doing, and becoming. 

Critical practices in climate education 

My primary postdoctoral project at NTNU is an ethnomethodolgical study of teaching and learning practices relating to climate change. It is premised on the theoretical position that formal (mathematics) education forges a fundamentally alienating relationship between people and the natural environment; as such, to avert ecological catastrophe would require subverting traditional approaches in schoolrooms. Empirically, my core methods involves following such subversions as they unfold in disciplinary education across formal settings; a supplementary strand looks towards informal cultural ecological practices of communities immediately faced with climate disaster in order to learn what schools can do differently in the context of climate-related education. In particular, I hope to figure out how schooled knowledge—which has long been practiced indoors and thought of as abstract and objective, with little to no connection to life or earth—can be reoriented outwards, towards the democratic building of a sustainable world. 

The first phase of fieldwork for this project has been completed in a Norwegian high school literature classroom. Emergent findings suggest that to slow the march of climate change demands a restoring of people to the earth by reversing the Eurocentric epistemological separation of culture and nature. They urge for interdisciplinary approaches in formal education that acknowledge and draw on the more-than-human and indigenous ways of being in and knowing about nature. Importantly, it offers that the only way to apprehend and stop imminent ecological death is by making our way back to and as a part of nature, rather than being at interminable odds with it. A second phase of fieldwork, this time in a biology classroom in the same high school, is set to take place in the new year 

In parallel, I am pursuing a second empirical thread, one involving the artistic form known as ‘kolam,’ a ritual practice local to South India and Southeast Asia. Made largely by women across social and economic classes and with varying degrees of formal education, kolams are intricate geometrical decorations made from dry or wet rice flour and placed at the thresholds of homes, buildings and temples. There is no formal training in kolam-making; yet, every morning, kolam artists produce large, ephemeral and mathematically complex creations in a matter of minutes. As such, the artform offers fertile ground for studying learning as a situated, ecofeminist phenomenon unfolding in a traditional community of practice caught in the crosshairs of drastic environmental change. Fieldwork for this phase of the study is set to commence in Chennai, a major city in South India, in November 2026.

Book project: Teacher-subject/Subject-teacher

My forthcoming book, ‘Teacher-Subject/Subject-Teacher,’ traces the inventive practices teachers undertake in response to the pressures of neoliberal life conditions. The book conceives of teaching as an interactive performance; no two performances are identical and each performance is transient. As neoliberal educational policy extends its reach into classrooms everywhere, seeking to closely monitor and prescribe what unfolds inside them, I intend the book as an account of teaching as a performance of resistance to these imperatives. The manuscript pairs my extensive research into teaching and learning across formal and informal contexts with 15 years’ worth of experience as a university and K12 teacher to surface the creative ways in which teachers refuse confinement in times – like ours – of social and political destabilization. Chapters include accounts from my many research projects, including the current postdoctoral project in Norway on teaching about the climate; my dissertation study on mathematicians in the margins; and my study of transformative contemporary Carnatic Music teaching.

Previous and continuing research

Within the field of Mathematics Education, I have brought together perspectives from the Learning Sciences and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to interrogate the sociopolitical dimensions of mathematical practice by illuminating how marginalized actors reproduce, challenge, and transform the discipline. My most recent major study in this area explored the ways in which society, culture, and politics shape mathematical sensemaking and subjectivity among professional mathematicians in North American universities, with the goal of addressing the enduring marginalization of women of color in higher mathematics. My research has made conceptual and practical interventions to reorient mathematics education toward the building of a liberated future. I continue to publish these findings in journals and criculate this research at conferences and academic seminars. I also draw on this research in my teaching of mathematics classes; it also provides helpful provocations to pre-service and in-service mathematics teachers working with me to deepen their practice.

Another project, from which I also continue to publish, considers, from a postcolonial Marxist perspective, the learning of a South Indian classical music form and it's entanglements with caste, nation-making, globalization, and coloniality. The study built from my expericnes as a student of Carnatic Music growing up in India and as a returning learner to the practice as an adult in the west. Empirical analyses surfaced, among others, the way collective diasporic memory was summoned, negotiated, recalled and misremembered in the learning of the art form in a U.S. based class for returning adult singers.