Analysing geographical locality in research on gender and students’ socio-emotional relationships with school mathematics: a scoping review

Abstract

Abstract This paper extends research on intersectionality in mathematics education by exploring how gender is related to, and complicated by, geographical locality. From a systematically identified body of 152 articles on gender and students’ socio-emotional relationships with mathematics in compulsory schooling, we identified 43 that recognised the relationship between locality and gender. A thematic scoping review of these 43 articles examined how locality–gender was operationalised through research design, data, analysis and interpretation. We draw on Agnew’s (1987) conceptualisation of locality, which encompasses both “location” (macro-structural factors or processes) and “locale” (micro-level interactions), and Leyva and Nazemi’s (2024) white cisheteropatriarchal space framework to delineate five themes in this literature. Illustrating how these different thematic groups deploy the relational unit of locality–gender, we conclude by highlighting two key methodological problems that arise from our review. Firstly, articles that use macro-level data (e.g., global gender parity indicators or global value surveys) tend to obscure the complexity and particularity of how gender and mathematics are produced and understood in localised spaces. Secondly, whilst there is a desire to make visible non-dominant localities, this is often obscured by the need to establish empirical generalisation through aligning findings with research from more dominant localities (such as the USA and Western Europe). However, in nine articles, a more nuanced dialectic understanding of the relation between global patriarchal structures of oppression and localised gendered relations is discussed. We reflect on the theoretical and methodological implications for future research.