Editorial for a special issue on innovating the mathematics curriculum in precarious times

There is emerging interest among some mathematics education scholars in questions around mathematics and mathematics education in relation to the multiple, related issues of climate change, poverty, inequality, health crises, discrimination, and totalitarianism. This interest can be seen in an increasing, but still relatively small, number of submissions on these topics to journals and, for instance, journal special issues including Mathematics Education and the Living World (edited by Boylan & Coles, 2017); Mathematics for “Citizenship” and its “Other” in a “Global” World: Critical Issues on Mathematics Education, Globalisation and Local Communities (edited by Chronaki & Yolcu, 2021); and Mathematics Education in a Time of Crisis – A Viral Pandemic (edited by Chan et al., 2021). Mathematics education scholarship has, for many years, explored the socio-political aspects of mathematics and mathematics education in local and global difference and precarity, for example, work within critical mathematics education (e.g. Gutstein, 2012; Sakonidis et al., 1994; Vithal, 2002) and ethnomathematics (e.g. D’Ambrosio, 2006; Mosimege, 2017; Rosa & Orey, 2011). Yet, what appears new is an explicit turn towards ecology (Coles, 2022) and a de-centring of the human perspective. There is growing recognition – not new, but illuminated by the recent global health pandemic and extreme climate-related events – of a changing, precarious world and the need for mathematics education to account for its role and have a response. One of the connections between us, as guest editors, was our involvement in a project funded by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) that aimed to consider how the mathematics curriculum, in Higher Education contexts, could innovate to become more relevant to the world we find ourselves in. The WUN project involved a network of researchers and their universities, in different parts of the world (Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom and theUnited States), pursuing different curriculum development and research initiatives that all fell under the umbrella of Innovating the Mathematics Curriculum in Times of Change: Towards Local and Global Relevance. This project was conceptualised in 2019, and enacted from 2020 during the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic. Two of the articles that follow (Helliwell & Ng, 2022; Solares-Rojas et al., 2022) arise from that project. We see as significant that there are many co-authors across the articles in the Special Issue and that the articles encompass work which took place across five continents. One of our central aims in planning this Special Issue was to offer new perspectives and findings that help us consider a mathematics curriculum in precarious times, at any level of schooling or Higher Education, or out-of-school contexts. By curriculum we mean the knowledge or knowings that are intended, implemented or attained. Precarity points to living life without promise and stability, and with vulnerability to others. In this Editorial, we set out some of the thinking that led us to propose and frame the Special Issue in the way we have, and we then look forward to the articles that follow.