Communitarian Mathematics Education: Walking into boundaries

In this article, we outline some of the challenges involved in the construction of a communitarian mathematics education within the realms of the Urban Boundaries Project. The Urban Boundaries Project has been innovative in the way it congregates the critical development of basic needs of three distinct communities with an Ethnomathematics Posture (Mesquita, 2011), where concepts such as critical participation, ethnomathematics, violence, and urban boundaries, are discussed through political philosophy. This posture allows us to share the local history of the empowerment, autonomy, and wisdom of the three communities’ situationality involved in the project, i.e., their knowledge of their political space. The local history is shared through the systematization of some content collected with critical ethnographical registration. To put it in Lacanian terms, we seek to symbolize a set of life-world experiences that have been historically neglected in mathematics education research, as well as in educational sciences more generally. As a result, this paper instigates the exploration of “disturbing” choices in the mathematical education culture.