For What Is an Ethical Mathematics Education Research? On Foucauldian Ethics as the Conscious Practice of Freedom

Spanning both normative and nonnormative, modern and postmodern conceptions, ethics is not univocal in its meaning. Despite efforts by mathematics education researchers to introduce a postmodern ethics, these attempts fall short. How, then, does a postmodern, ethical mathematics education research look? If we tentatively hold a Foucauldian ethics as the conscious practice of freedom as one such postmodern ethical approach, the question becomes: how do we envision a mathematics education research that centers freedom through care of the self? Care of the self, as a mathematics education researcher, entails freely choosing to seek to understand the ways that mathematics education researcher is being defined by the field, to recognize the ways that that proffered definition limits our freedom to be mathematics education researchers in our own chosen way, and choosing to enact freedom in the way that we constitute ourselves as mathematics education researchers. In short, the aim of an ethical mathematics education research is to reconfigure mathematics education researcher into a freer subject position. Above all, the freedom of individuals to constitute themselves as mathematics education researchers in the particular ways that they wish is of highest ethical importance.