Arundhati Velamur
About
My pronouns are they/them/theirs. I encourage you to read more about pronouns, what they mean, and why they matter here.
I am a trans/queer researcher, organizer, and (mathematics) teacher. Across these roles I have focused on how people come together to transform their circumstances, and therefore the world.
As a researcher, I primarily study learning and development. I view learning as a social-political transformation of the self: we know that we have learned something when we start to act differently in the world than we used to. Broadly, I explore how people come to be different kinds of actors in the world through their experiences as members of communities (of practice). I try to make sense of this through ethnographic and sociocultural research that allows me to trace how our subjectivities shift over time and as we move through the world. This work is firmly political, as how people come to act in the world is shaped by their relationships to each other, their environment, and to capital. I am a third world feminist scholar and use interdisciplinary methods like narrative analysis and interaction analysis to make my arguments.
As a labor organizer, I am committed to the belief that collective action of workers everywhere is vital to the building of a just world. Toward this end, I have agitated with my comrades for campuses free of police and military presence, where students, teachers and researchers can explore critical questions and create knowledge for a sustainable future freely and safely. In the current moment of increasing surveillance by authoritarian states across the world, I see unions—and more broadly solidarity—as crucial to the success of the anti-fascist movement.
I have worked as a teacher in different formal settings for over a decade now. My primary degree is in mathematics, a subject I have taught to students from primary school to college. I am also a teacher educator and have worked with pre-service and in-service teachers to help them realize their teacher identity and practice. I think of teaching as an art—and sometimes as a performance—and try to help educators find their rhythm as artists.
Research
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 towards social, political, and economic liberation. I try to think with a variety of theory-driven qualitative methods—from ethnography and queer phenomenology to 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.
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 learning by illuminating how marginalized actors reproduce, challenge, and transform the discipline. My most recent research 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 helped make conceptual and practical interventions to reorient mathematics education toward the building of a liberated future. I consider liberation a fundamentally anti-capitalist project, one that requires a re-making of our relationships to each other and to our environment. A liberated future is also, therefore, a necessarily sustainable one. This is the focus of my current research at NTNU, where I am developing ethnographic approaches to study the role of mathematics in producing a certain kind of relationship between people and their (natural and built) environments. Together with colleagues at ILU and beyond, I seek to unpack the urgent geographical and ecological concerns mathematics is implicated in. I hope to figure out how mathematics education—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.
Critical Mathematics Education for a Sustainable Future (2025 - )
Teaching
My classrooms typically look busy, lively, and sometimes—perhaps an especially rare sight in mathematics classrooms—even phsyically engaging. They are exploratory and problem-based, collaborative and participatory, and perhaps most significantly, center on student voice. An important aspect of my practice as an educator is using a problem-posing approach to learning. Presented with a situation or text or some information, my students and I come together to ask questions of the object under interrogation. Confronted with a statistic on how New York City Department of Education test scores fall along dimensions of race and gender, for instance, we start by wondering about what that number tells us about the education system and the society that made it. In a class on educational theory and racism, we have wondered: how can we synthesize an understanding of a concept as nuanced as racial capitalism by bridging the texts we are reading with our own lived experiences? If learning is, as Lave & Wenger (1991) noted, “shifting participation in communities of practice,” I spend my time thinking about how to foster a community of practice in which learners can make mistakes, explore ideas together, and participate in collaborative activities that help them make sense of the world they live in.
I am not teaching any classes this year, but hope to be next!