Title:

Safe Spaces in Mathematics Education: Exploring Queer Perspectives on Learning and Professional Trajectories

Abstract:

This guest lecture will present preliminary insights from an ongoing qualitative study examining how queer and gender-diverse mathematicians recall and interpret their experiences in school and academic settings. Drawing on life-history interviews, the project explores how everyday classroom practices, interactions with teachers and peers, and broader cultural expectations around mathematics may have shaped feelings of belonging, exclusion, or continuity in participants’ educational trajectories. The lecture will highlight how certain moments were remembered as affirming or "safe", while others appeared to constrain participation or visibility. Rather than offering definitive conclusions, the session will outline emerging themes and invite discussion on how mathematical spaces become livable—or not—for queer individuals. By shifting attention from attrition to the question of what enables people to stay, the lecture aims to contribute to wider conversations on inclusion, diversity, and the creation of supportive environments in gender-critical educational research.

About the speaker:

PhD Julchen Brieger works as a research assistant in the field of primary school mathematics teaching at the Centre for Teacher Training and Educational Research (University of Technology Chemnitz). Her research interests include Intersectional interconnections of inequality in mathematics teaching, Doing gender and doing mathematics, Gender-sensitive mathematics teaching, Philosophy of mathematics, Paradoxes and antinomies in science and their potential for school education and Infinity in mathematics and philosophy and the respective subject didactics.

Registration:

Please send an email to: gib@uni-jena.de?