Sines of Disability: Disrupting Ableism in Mathematics and Beyond
Dr. Daniel Reinholz
When you think about a mathematician, what comes to mind? Do you think of a disabled person? If you’re following common stereotypes in society, almost certainly not. Although disability and mathematics have received a lot of attention in broader society, much of it has been negative attention. For example, the 2001 movie Beautiful Mind portrays the American mathematician John Nash as socially inept and paranoid. In this story, Nash must “overcome” his schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, but, ultimately, he is consumed by mental illness. A variation on a theme, A Brilliant Young Mind (also known as X+Y) tells the story of Nathan, an autistic yet “socially awkward math prodigy,” who finds comfort in mathematics to cope with his troubled social interactions. Both John and Nathan make mathematical achievements supposedly despite their disabilities.
Lisette Torres-Gerald
Aside from these cultural references related to success in mathematics through overcoming disability, there are volumes of research that have been written about what disabled people can’t do in mathematics (Lambert & Tan, 2017), and there’s almost nothing of substance that describes disabled brilliance. That changes today, with the launch of Sines of Disability (www.sinesofdisability.com). We are a community of mathematicians, mathematics educators, and activists who are committed to disrupting ableism in mathematics and beyond.
Conversations about disability in mathematics are often surrounded by stigma, silence, and shame. Disability is seen as an individual flaw that needs to be hidden or overcome, so that disabled folks can “be normal.” The irony is that many of the greatest mathematicians—Newton, Dirac, Nash, and Riemann, to name a few—are all hypothesized to have been autistic or otherwise neurodiverse (James, 2003). But have you ever been a part of a conversation praising these mathematicians for their disabled brilliance? Society tells us that these mathematicians were great despite being disabled, not because of it.
It shouldn’t be surprising that most disabled people in the mathematics community experience a high degree of disconnectedness and loneliness. Many disabilities are invisible, and there’s no way for disabled folks to identify each other just by looking at one another. And because we’re pathologized in mathematics, either as being “too good” or “not good enough” at mathematics (Reinholz, 2021), most disabled mathematicians would prefer not to share their disabilities in any public way. They use their psychological and emotional energy to perform “normality,” which is exhausting. How then, do we expect to serve as role models for future generations of disabled people with mathematical dreams and aspirations? Research is clear that role models matter (Marx & Roman, 2002), yet disabled students grow up without role models (Mueller, 2021), and this is doubly true for disabled students who need mathematical role models. If we asked you to, could you come up with a list of ten disabled mathematicians who you admire? How about five? Most likely not. That’s a huge problem.
People are silent about disability because society tells us to be ashamed of it. We are not ashamed of being disabled. We are proud. The disability justice movement tells us how disability is a political identity, and we reclaim our identities as tools for positive change in the mathematics community. The prevailing wisdom in the world today is that disabled people struggle because of our individual flaws. This is false. While disabilities can offer their own challenges, overwhelmingly the barriers that we face are created by society. We are disabled by society and, in actuality, we have our own strengths as disabled people (a so-called “disability gain”). Ableism is all around us, but most nondisabled people don’t see it. We all need to see it, so that we can dismantle it. Thus, we launch Sines of Disability as one small step towards this dismantling.
Our goal is that Sines of Disability will be the first step to celebrating disabled brilliance and creating a new narrative about how to think about disability and mathematics. We are building out a community of disabled people so that we can support one another, and so that we can educate the broader community. We aim to build solidarity across disabilities and are committed to dismantling ableism and other interlocking systems of oppression such as racism and sexism. We reject the stigma that surrounds disability in the math community. We reject the ways that mathematics and ableism can work together to label people as “smart” or “not smart,” and we are looking for other disabled mathematicians and mathematics educators to join us. Spread the word so that we can make a change in our community.
Daniel Reinholz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at San Diego State University.
Lisette Torres-Gerald is a Senior Research Associate and Project Coordinator at TERC.
Sines of Disability is a new community to support disability representation and inclusion in mathematics.
References
James, I. (2003). Autism in mathematicians. The Mathematical Intelligencer, 25(4), 62–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02984863
Lambert, R., & Tan, P. (2017). Conceptualizations of Students with and without Disabilities as Mathematical Problem Solvers in Educational Research: A Critical Review. Education Sciences, 7(2), 51. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci7020051
Marx, D. M., & Roman, J. S. (2002). Female Role Models: Protecting Women’s Math Test Performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(9), 1183–1193. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672022812004
Mueller, C. O. (2021). “I Didn’t Know People With Disabilities Could Grow Up to Be Adults”: Disability History, Curriculum, and Identity in Special Education. Teacher Education and Special Education, 44(3), 189–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888406421996069
Reinholz, D. L. (2021). Disability, mathematics, and the Goldilocks conundrum: Implications for mathematics education. For the Learning of Mathematics, 41(2), 19–20.