Contact: moore@cppi.me
Alexander S. Moore is a 2022 Bassi Scholar, and a PhD Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in Mathematics Education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (more commonly known as Virginia Tech) in the state of Virginia, USA. He is also the Technology Section Editor for Virginia Mathematics Teacher Journal, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Theoretical and Marginal Mathematics Education (JTM ME), and the Founder and Director of The Critical Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Institute for Mathematics Education (CPPI ME).
Research areas: mathematics education, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideological criticism, gender & sexuality, feminist/queer theory (queer negative), applications of feminist science and technology studies, axis of Lacan-Hegel-Marx-Žižek.
Moore’s work is based on the view that educational institutions are sites of capitalist production in modernity. He draws heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis and ideological criticism—as well as Marxist feminism, Žižek’s Hegelian philosophy, and applications of feminist science and technology studies—to investigate the psychic relationship of gender, sexuality, and mathematics in educational settings, and the role this relationship plays in social reproduction more broadly under capitalism. His dissertation performs a Lacanian ideology critique of existing literature on gender in mathematics education. The paper for which he was selected as a Bassi Scholar argues that the capitalist mode of school forces the creation of the signifier ‘woman,’ which is then reified through neoliberal and postmodern research on gender in mathematics education.
Moore’s overarching project contributes to the field of mathematics education research by problematizing ideological commitments made by researchers and society generally regarding the purpose of teaching and learning mathematics, as well as the purpose of “equity” research (specifically research on gender) focused on students’ achievement of success in mathematics. By taking a psychoanalytic and psychosexual approach to the role of social identities (such as gender) in mathematics education settings, Moore’s work offers a critical counter-narrative to the prevailing neoliberal fashions in mathematics education research that disavow (or in most cases, ignore) the role of the unconscious and desire in structuring relations of sexual difference with respect to mathematics—a language of pure signifiers that represents a peculiar and psychically unique educational content.