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  • Katie McCallum

Katie McCallum

Katie McCallum is a first-year TECHNE-funded PhD student at the University of Brighton, using art practice and linguistic pragmatics theory to build up an artist’s ethnography of mathematical communication. She studied Fine Art Sculpture at Brighton in 2007-2010, linking up with the linguistics community at the university five years later for an MRes exploring diagramming practices in knot theory. In the meantime, she has curated exhibitions that explore what fine art has to say about mathematics and new technologies, and is now co-chair of exhibitions for the annual international Bridges Conference for Mathematics and the Arts.

Email address: k.mccallum@brighton.ac.uk

Qualification: PhD

Timeframe: 2016 - 2019

Katie-McCallum

Thesis title

Situating Mathematical Communication: the settings, interactions and material practices of contemporary mathematical research.

My research

This research uses a synthesis of concepts from art, mathematics and linguistic pragmatics in an ethnographic study of mathematics communication. Practitioners and laypersons alike tend to draw a divide between ‘mathematics’ as an ideal, and the everyday practices and processes that characterise its place in human lives. My intention is to build up an ethnography of communication in mathematical research that not only considers and takes seriously these underdiscussed situated and material aspects but also itself operates across different modes, in recording, analysis and presentation. A question at the heart of this research is to what extent knowledge can be divorced from its settings and the persons involved in its production; this is a question very appropriate to ask of mathematical knowledge, as a field of studies that is very often perceived as acultural.

Following the ideas of Grice, and work that has developed upon them, it would seem that perceived intentions are central to the understanding of deliberate communication; bringing such considerations into an analysis of communication in mathematics is a move likely to have exciting consequences. I augment a pragmatic, cognitivist approach to analysing communicative strategies from real-world observations with the attention to material settings, collaborative cognition, and multimodality found in situated cognition ethnographies. I am observing communicative events surrounding developing mathematical work as it progresses, drawing upon the field of linguistic pragmatics to analyse the mechanics of communication, and using an art practice approach to record and explore data in a way that foregrounds materials and situations.

Funder: TECHNE

Supervisors

Dr Tim Wharton

Dr Andrew Fish

Dr Ole Hagen

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