E De Freitas
Biographic Data
| ID | 41912 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E De Freitas |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | De Freitas |
| SIGNATURE | DE FREITAS E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Manchester Metropolitan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0795-8804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Exposing cybernetic assumptions in urban demographic models
This paper is focused on the impact of cybernetics on social theories of segregation. We historically trace cybernetic models as they moved from information theory into sociology, where they were used to justify de facto segregation as part of ‘self-organizing’ emergent tendencies in urban environments. Our work is intended to support the fields of spatial justice, Black geographies, and critical quantitative methodologies, by exposing how cybern…
New Possibilities for Spatial Research
This article presents creative methodologies for studying the emotionally charged environment of school buildings, with particular attention to situated movements and modes of engagement after the Covid pandemic. Drawing on digital-sensory methods and futuring practices, developed in collaboration with staff and students in a UK secondary school, we present a series of speculative architectural models and living maps. Our approach is informed by …
Fragile texts and machine readers
This paper explores the following questions: What is reading all about, as our technical milieu becomes increasingly digital and our reading increasingly automated? What is entailed in closely reading a book, in studying and handling the book as an object? And what is the role of philosophy—and in reading philosophy—as we grapple with new technical modes of reading? Guided by philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this paper compares the language heuristi…
New Spatial Imaginaries for International Curriculum Projects
This article explores the complex relational landscape of international partnerships where local and transnational education objectives are entangled. We present a methodological practice for experimenting with diagrams and maps. Our emphasis on spatial rendering of local/global relationality is intended to invite discussion about the postcolonial context of international education work and the geopolitics of transnational curriculum. We pursue a…
Landing Sites, Cities, and Nonplaces
This article keeps tuned to the ritual of scholarly gathering, an activity continued somewhat differently today in the online meeting. We aim to speak to current concerns about place and belonging under new climatic and digital regimes. We pose the question, “What will be the spatial logic and shape of scholarly collaboration after lockdown and ‘zoomtopia’?” The article recounts our decade-long collaboration and is structured around 10 sketches o…
Mathematics in the middle
This paper revisits philosophical questions regarding the relationship between mathematics and matter. I briefly present four contrary and contemporary perspectives on the speculative force of mathematics, as a provocation for further discussion on the subject of sciento-metrics. I first consider the ideas of the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, as a way of setting the stage for various kinds of materialist philosophies of mathematics. I then tur…
New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene
Interest in new empiricisms and transdisciplinary methods has led many social inquirers to engage with 20th-century post-classical physical science. Many of these projects have focused on alternative matter–mind mixtures and in/organic variation, concerned that past theories of sociality have dismissed the vibrancy and animacy of the nonhuman material world. This paper explores the power of speculative fiction to help us rethink empiricism in pos…
Measured Education
Education has long been a space of in which knowledge was created through data practices. But the ongoing datafication and digitalisation has made new forms of datafied knowledge production within educational research possible. This new form of datafied knowledge creation has shifted the sites of expertise and the authority to create educational knowledge to a more-than-human network. This panel conceptually and empirically examines the possibili…
Science Studies and the Metamorphic Multiple Earth
This essay focuses on Bruno Latour's recent attempts to study the metamorphic zone of terrestrial life, within the current climate crisis and environmental 'cosmocolossus.' I explore his proposal for a risky diplomacy in the Anthropocene 'end times,' as a way of dealing with the increasingly tense relations between polarized and weaponized perspectives. I show how his work continues to seek a form of scientific practice that involves the inventio…
The Quantum Mind
Human reasoning about and with uncertainty is often at odds with the principles of classical probability. Order effects, conjunction biases, and sure-thing inclinations suggest that an entirely different set of probability axioms could be developed and indeed may be needed to describe such habits. Recent work in diverse fields, including cognitive science, economics, and information theory, explores alternative approaches to decision theory. This…
The biosocial subject
Sensor technologies are increasingly part of everyday life, embedded in buildings (movement, sound, temperature) and worn on persons (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, eye tracking). This paper presents a theoretical framework for research on computational sensor data. My approach moves away from theories of agent-centered perceptual synthesis (on behalf of a perceiving organism) and towards a more expansive understanding of the biosocial lear…
Thinking with Spinoza about education
Thinking with Spinoza about education involves thinking with and beyond his authored texts, situating his work within the tradition of Western thought, and exploring his contribution to the philoso
The temporal fabric of research methods
This paper responds to recent concerns regarding the future of the digital social sciences. The aim of the paper is to identify and elaborate five core characteristics of social science research method. The first three characteristics – the desire for origins, the need to exclude, and the establishment of a regime of labour – typically reinstate social orders and hierarchies, and heavily control if not curtail knowledge production. The fourth cha…
Science and Technology Studies × Educational Studies
This special issue presents a collection of articles that multiplies Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Educational Studies, in an attempt to think differently about science, technology, eng
Nonhuman Findings from the Laboratory of Speculative Sociology
This work of speculative fiction and commentary describes a laboratory focused on human sense and affect. The laboratory is alive with computational capacity, recursively elaborating and generating data. The very notion of recording data is radically reconceived through this speculative fiction, as it points toward a new materialist sens/ability and new forms of social science
Karen Barad's Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics
This article focuses on Karen Barad's quantum ontology and her attempts to reformulate the concept of relationality. The aim is to show how Barad's work articulates a new kind of empiricism for the social sciences, by reclaiming the creative and speculative force of experimental practice and by recentering the philosophical problem as a source of inquiry. Relationality is redefined through discussions of diffractive apparatus, more-than-human per…
Special Issue Rethinking the Role of STEM in the Philosophy of Education
Number sense and the calculating child
Children and animals of all kinds are said to develop some degree of number sense. The search for ‘number neurons’ and neural correlates of computational thinking aims to identify biological primitives to explain the emergence of number sense. This work typically looks for the sources of number sense in organisms, but one might extend this search and study the possibility of a calculating matter more generally. Such a speculative project explores…
Calculating Matter and Recombinant Subjects
Because different mathematical practices are aligned with different ontologies, it matters what kind of mathematics we bring to bear in social theory. This article explores the open and urgent question as to whether and how calculation becomes an inventive practice that doesn't simply serve the control society. In search of a non-axiomatic mathematical problematic, I examine the infinitesimal for its enigmatic role in calculation and show how Del…
Alternative Ontologies of Number
The New Empiricism of the Fractal Fold
A new configuration of social science is emerging in these digital times, as we tap into new kinds of data that trouble conventions regarding what constitutes the unit of analysis, and question the extent to which these data are owned or even correlated to a definitive organic and individuated subject customarily referred to as 'human.' These methodological shifts demand a more careful consideration of the historical lineage of empiricism and its…
Classroom Video Data and the Time-Image
Video data has now become the most common form of data for educational researchers studying classroom interaction and school culture. Software protocols for analysing vast archives of video data are deployed regularly, allowing researchers to annotate, code and sort images. These protocols are often applied by researchers without reflection or reference to the extensive philosophical work in film and media studies. Without exception, this researc…
New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity
Emphasis on discourse and language-use has fueled the study of identity in education over the last few decades. This paper argues that these approaches fail to fully account for the complex materiality of life, and should be supplemented by new materialist tools for studying language as material. This new materialist approach considers language outside of the usual information–communication model. We argue that this approach is fruitful in studyi…
Movement, Memory and Mathematics
Using the work of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to examine the nature of movement and memory, this article contributes to recent research on the role of the body in learning mathematics. Our aim in this paper is to introduce the ideas of Bergson and to show how these ideas shed light on mathematics classroom activity. Bergson’s monist philosophy provides a framework for understanding the materiality of both bodies and mathematical concept…
The moving image in education research
While audio recordings and observation might have dominated past decades of classroom research, video data is now the dominant form of data in the field. Ubiquitous videography is standard practice today in archiving the body of both the teacher and the student, and vast amounts of classroom and experiment clips are stored in online archives. Yet little to no research interrogates how this data partakes in the history of scientific cinema, assemb…
Mathematics and the Body
This book expands the landscape of research in mathematics education by analyzing how the body influences mathematical thinking
The Classroom as Rhizome
This article calls attention to the unexamined role of diagrams in educational research and offers examples of alternative diagramming practices or tools that shed light on classroom interaction as a rhizomatic process. Drawing extensively on the work of Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Châtelet, this article explores the power of diagramming as a creative force in research rather than a reductive one. The concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and kn…
New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity
Emphasis on discourse and language-use has fueled the study of identity in education over the last few decades. This paper argues that these approaches fail to fully account for the complex materiality of life, and should be supplemented by new materialist tools for studying language as material. This new materialist approach considers language outside of the usual information–communication model. We argue that this approach is fruitful in studyi…
Karen Barad's Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics
This article focuses on Karen Barad's quantum ontology and her attempts to reformulate the concept of relationality. The aim is to show how Barad's work articulates a new kind of empiricism for the social sciences, by reclaiming the creative and speculative force of experimental practice and by recentering the philosophical problem as a source of inquiry. Relationality is redefined through discussions of diffractive apparatus, more-than-human per…
The New Empiricism of the Fractal Fold
A new configuration of social science is emerging in these digital times, as we tap into new kinds of data that trouble conventions regarding what constitutes the unit of analysis, and question the extent to which these data are owned or even correlated to a definitive organic and individuated subject customarily referred to as 'human.' These methodological shifts demand a more careful consideration of the historical lineage of empiricism and its…
The biosocial subject
Sensor technologies are increasingly part of everyday life, embedded in buildings (movement, sound, temperature) and worn on persons (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, eye tracking). This paper presents a theoretical framework for research on computational sensor data. My approach moves away from theories of agent-centered perceptual synthesis (on behalf of a perceiving organism) and towards a more expansive understanding of the biosocial lear…
The temporal fabric of research methods
This paper responds to recent concerns regarding the future of the digital social sciences. The aim of the paper is to identify and elaborate five core characteristics of social science research method. The first three characteristics – the desire for origins, the need to exclude, and the establishment of a regime of labour – typically reinstate social orders and hierarchies, and heavily control if not curtail knowledge production. The fourth cha…
Alternative Ontologies of Number
(De)facing the Self
This article draws on Lacanian theories of subjectivity to examine notions of the self in autoethnography. The authors discuss philosophical differences between Humanist and post-Humanist notions of the self and show how these notions are correlated to particular self-study genres, such as confession and testimony. The authors argue that autoethnographic narratives exhibit contradictory tendencies toward both Humanist and post-Humanist conception…
The moving image in education research
While audio recordings and observation might have dominated past decades of classroom research, video data is now the dominant form of data in the field. Ubiquitous videography is standard practice today in archiving the body of both the teacher and the student, and vast amounts of classroom and experiment clips are stored in online archives. Yet little to no research interrogates how this data partakes in the history of scientific cinema, assemb…
Teaching for diversity by troubling whiteness
This paper explores strategies to help prepare pre‐service teachers from a predominantly white, relatively isolated island in Atlantic Canada to teach for diversity. The paper proposes a modified framework for ‘teacher identity development’ that pivots around three foci for enhancing teacher awareness and commitment to action: (1) relations of power and privilege; (2) youth culture and critical media literacy; (3) theory as an interpretive tool. …
Science and Technology Studies × Educational Studies
This special issue presents a collection of articles that multiplies Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Educational Studies, in an attempt to think differently about science, technology, eng
Nonhuman Findings from the Laboratory of Speculative Sociology
This work of speculative fiction and commentary describes a laboratory focused on human sense and affect. The laboratory is alive with computational capacity, recursively elaborating and generating data. The very notion of recording data is radically reconceived through this speculative fiction, as it points toward a new materialist sens/ability and new forms of social science
Science Studies and the Metamorphic Multiple Earth
This essay focuses on Bruno Latour's recent attempts to study the metamorphic zone of terrestrial life, within the current climate crisis and environmental 'cosmocolossus.' I explore his proposal for a risky diplomacy in the Anthropocene 'end times,' as a way of dealing with the increasingly tense relations between polarized and weaponized perspectives. I show how his work continues to seek a form of scientific practice that involves the inventio…
Calculating Matter and Recombinant Subjects
Because different mathematical practices are aligned with different ontologies, it matters what kind of mathematics we bring to bear in social theory. This article explores the open and urgent question as to whether and how calculation becomes an inventive practice that doesn't simply serve the control society. In search of a non-axiomatic mathematical problematic, I examine the infinitesimal for its enigmatic role in calculation and show how Del…
What Were You Thinking? A Deleuzian/Guattarian analysis of communication in the mathematics classroom
The primary aim of this article is to bring the work of Deleuze and Guattari to bear on the question ofcommunication in the classroom. I focus on the mathematics classroom, where agency and subjectivity are highly regulated by the rituals of the discipline, and where neoliberal psychological frameworks continue to dominate theories of teaching and learning. Moreover, the nature ofcommunication in mathematics classrooms remains highlyelusive and p…
New Possibilities for Spatial Research
This article presents creative methodologies for studying the emotionally charged environment of school buildings, with particular attention to situated movements and modes of engagement after the Covid pandemic. Drawing on digital-sensory methods and futuring practices, developed in collaboration with staff and students in a UK secondary school, we present a series of speculative architectural models and living maps. Our approach is informed by …
Thinking with Spinoza about education
Thinking with Spinoza about education involves thinking with and beyond his authored texts, situating his work within the tradition of Western thought, and exploring his contribution to the philoso
Fragile texts and machine readers
This paper explores the following questions: What is reading all about, as our technical milieu becomes increasingly digital and our reading increasingly automated? What is entailed in closely reading a book, in studying and handling the book as an object? And what is the role of philosophy—and in reading philosophy—as we grapple with new technical modes of reading? Guided by philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this paper compares the language heuristi…
Landing Sites, Cities, and Nonplaces
This article keeps tuned to the ritual of scholarly gathering, an activity continued somewhat differently today in the online meeting. We aim to speak to current concerns about place and belonging under new climatic and digital regimes. We pose the question, “What will be the spatial logic and shape of scholarly collaboration after lockdown and ‘zoomtopia’?” The article recounts our decade-long collaboration and is structured around 10 sketches o…
Movement, Memory and Mathematics
Using the work of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to examine the nature of movement and memory, this article contributes to recent research on the role of the body in learning mathematics. Our aim in this paper is to introduce the ideas of Bergson and to show how these ideas shed light on mathematics classroom activity. Bergson’s monist philosophy provides a framework for understanding the materiality of both bodies and mathematical concept…
The haptic nature of gesture
This paper is about re-thinking gesture in order to reckon with its material and haptic nature, especially in the current multitouch technology environment. This re-thinking of gesture returns to the principle of indexicality found in Peirce’s material semiotics, and develops this principle through the work of Gilles Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze around hand-eye relationships. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Streek, we propose and discuss the notion …
The Mathematical Event
Traditional philosophy of mathematics has been concerned with the nature of mathematical objects rather than events. This traditional focus on reified objects is reflected in dominant theories of learning mathematics whereby the learner is meant to acquire familiarity with ideal mathematical objects, such as number, polygon, or tangent. I argue that the concept of event—rather than object—better captures the vitality of mathematics, and offers ne…
Mathematics and its other
In this article, the author examines how school mathematics maps itself onto the body, delineating the contours of a gendered learner. The author draws on Judith Butler to discuss the process by which school mathematics contributes to the stabilising/legitimating of a cultural arbitrary like gender, and how mathematics inscribes otherness onto the feminine. A student narrative entitled ‘Im/perfect Other’ is offered as a form of disruptive writing…
Teaching for diversity by troubling whiteness
This paper explores strategies to help prepare pre‐service teachers from a predominantly white, relatively isolated island in Atlantic Canada to teach for diversity. The paper proposes a modified framework for ‘teacher identity development’ that pivots around three foci for enhancing teacher awareness and commitment to action: (1) relations of power and privilege; (2) youth culture and critical media literacy; (3) theory as an interpretive tool. …
Mathematics and its other
In this article, the author examines how school mathematics maps itself onto the body, delineating the contours of a gendered learner. The author draws on Judith Butler to discuss the process by which school mathematics contributes to the stabilising/legitimating of a cultural arbitrary like gender, and how mathematics inscribes otherness onto the feminine. A student narrative entitled ‘Im/perfect Other’ is offered as a form of disruptive writing…
(De)facing the Self
This article draws on Lacanian theories of subjectivity to examine notions of the self in autoethnography. The authors discuss philosophical differences between Humanist and post-Humanist notions of the self and show how these notions are correlated to particular self-study genres, such as confession and testimony. The authors argue that autoethnographic narratives exhibit contradictory tendencies toward both Humanist and post-Humanist conception…
Mathematical meaning-making in whole-class conversation
This paper focuses on a brief whole-group conversation captured in a sixth grade classroom taught by an experienced teacher. Drawing upon systemic functional linguistics, we treat the conversation as a multi-semiotic text of the genre of teacher-guided mathematics problem framing. After describing the generic structure of the text and its context of situation, we analyze the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings students and teacher con…
Discursive Authority and Sociocultural Positioning in the Mathematics Classroom
What Were You Thinking? A Deleuzian/Guattarian analysis of communication in the mathematics classroom
The primary aim of this article is to bring the work of Deleuze and Guattari to bear on the question ofcommunication in the classroom. I focus on the mathematics classroom, where agency and subjectivity are highly regulated by the rituals of the discipline, and where neoliberal psychological frameworks continue to dominate theories of teaching and learning. Moreover, the nature ofcommunication in mathematics classrooms remains highlyelusive and p…
The Classroom as Rhizome
This article calls attention to the unexamined role of diagrams in educational research and offers examples of alternative diagramming practices or tools that shed light on classroom interaction as a rhizomatic process. Drawing extensively on the work of Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Châtelet, this article explores the power of diagramming as a creative force in research rather than a reductive one. The concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and kn…
The Mathematical Event
Traditional philosophy of mathematics has been concerned with the nature of mathematical objects rather than events. This traditional focus on reified objects is reflected in dominant theories of learning mathematics whereby the learner is meant to acquire familiarity with ideal mathematical objects, such as number, polygon, or tangent. I argue that the concept of event—rather than object—better captures the vitality of mathematics, and offers ne…
The haptic nature of gesture
This paper is about re-thinking gesture in order to reckon with its material and haptic nature, especially in the current multitouch technology environment. This re-thinking of gesture returns to the principle of indexicality found in Peirce’s material semiotics, and develops this principle through the work of Gilles Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze around hand-eye relationships. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Streek, we propose and discuss the notion …
Mathematics and the Body
This book expands the landscape of research in mathematics education by analyzing how the body influences mathematical thinking
Classroom Video Data and the Time-Image
Video data has now become the most common form of data for educational researchers studying classroom interaction and school culture. Software protocols for analysing vast archives of video data are deployed regularly, allowing researchers to annotate, code and sort images. These protocols are often applied by researchers without reflection or reference to the extensive philosophical work in film and media studies. Without exception, this researc…
New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity
Emphasis on discourse and language-use has fueled the study of identity in education over the last few decades. This paper argues that these approaches fail to fully account for the complex materiality of life, and should be supplemented by new materialist tools for studying language as material. This new materialist approach considers language outside of the usual information–communication model. We argue that this approach is fruitful in studyi…
Movement, Memory and Mathematics
Using the work of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to examine the nature of movement and memory, this article contributes to recent research on the role of the body in learning mathematics. Our aim in this paper is to introduce the ideas of Bergson and to show how these ideas shed light on mathematics classroom activity. Bergson’s monist philosophy provides a framework for understanding the materiality of both bodies and mathematical concept…
The moving image in education research
While audio recordings and observation might have dominated past decades of classroom research, video data is now the dominant form of data in the field. Ubiquitous videography is standard practice today in archiving the body of both the teacher and the student, and vast amounts of classroom and experiment clips are stored in online archives. Yet little to no research interrogates how this data partakes in the history of scientific cinema, assemb…
Special Issue Rethinking the Role of STEM in the Philosophy of Education
Number sense and the calculating child
Children and animals of all kinds are said to develop some degree of number sense. The search for ‘number neurons’ and neural correlates of computational thinking aims to identify biological primitives to explain the emergence of number sense. This work typically looks for the sources of number sense in organisms, but one might extend this search and study the possibility of a calculating matter more generally. Such a speculative project explores…
Calculating Matter and Recombinant Subjects
Because different mathematical practices are aligned with different ontologies, it matters what kind of mathematics we bring to bear in social theory. This article explores the open and urgent question as to whether and how calculation becomes an inventive practice that doesn't simply serve the control society. In search of a non-axiomatic mathematical problematic, I examine the infinitesimal for its enigmatic role in calculation and show how Del…
Alternative Ontologies of Number
The New Empiricism of the Fractal Fold
A new configuration of social science is emerging in these digital times, as we tap into new kinds of data that trouble conventions regarding what constitutes the unit of analysis, and question the extent to which these data are owned or even correlated to a definitive organic and individuated subject customarily referred to as 'human.' These methodological shifts demand a more careful consideration of the historical lineage of empiricism and its…
Thinking with Spinoza about education
Thinking with Spinoza about education involves thinking with and beyond his authored texts, situating his work within the tradition of Western thought, and exploring his contribution to the philoso
The temporal fabric of research methods
This paper responds to recent concerns regarding the future of the digital social sciences. The aim of the paper is to identify and elaborate five core characteristics of social science research method. The first three characteristics – the desire for origins, the need to exclude, and the establishment of a regime of labour – typically reinstate social orders and hierarchies, and heavily control if not curtail knowledge production. The fourth cha…
Science and Technology Studies × Educational Studies
This special issue presents a collection of articles that multiplies Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Educational Studies, in an attempt to think differently about science, technology, eng
Nonhuman Findings from the Laboratory of Speculative Sociology
This work of speculative fiction and commentary describes a laboratory focused on human sense and affect. The laboratory is alive with computational capacity, recursively elaborating and generating data. The very notion of recording data is radically reconceived through this speculative fiction, as it points toward a new materialist sens/ability and new forms of social science
Karen Barad's Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics
This article focuses on Karen Barad's quantum ontology and her attempts to reformulate the concept of relationality. The aim is to show how Barad's work articulates a new kind of empiricism for the social sciences, by reclaiming the creative and speculative force of experimental practice and by recentering the philosophical problem as a source of inquiry. Relationality is redefined through discussions of diffractive apparatus, more-than-human per…
The Quantum Mind
Human reasoning about and with uncertainty is often at odds with the principles of classical probability. Order effects, conjunction biases, and sure-thing inclinations suggest that an entirely different set of probability axioms could be developed and indeed may be needed to describe such habits. Recent work in diverse fields, including cognitive science, economics, and information theory, explores alternative approaches to decision theory. This…
Epistemology (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (10 works) · Pedagogy (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works)