This paper reflects on ‘community mathematics’ as a way of attending to forms of mathematical participation that take shape beyond formal schooling and carry transformative potential for how mathematics is recognised and valued. A substantial body of research has documented persistent inequalities in school mathematics, affecting not only attainment but also students’ socio-emotional relationships to the subject (Black, Mendick, & Solomon, 2009). These inequalities are closely tied to broader social divisions of gender, race, class, language, and institutional notions of ability, through the privileging of particular experiences and forms of competence, especially among young people from historically marginalised communities (Ladson-Billings, 1997; Watson et al., 2014). These patterns are reflected across European education systems, where PISA 2022 documents large and persistent gaps in mathematics performance associated with students’ socio-economic background (OECD, 2023). This points to an exclusionary mathematical landscape in which access to mathematics is shaped by enduring social and institutional hierarchies.

The idea of ‘community mathematics’ has begun to take shape through our recent work (Mégrourèche, Black, & Herington, 2025). It is informed by research examining mathematical activity in informal environments such as homes, museums, and interactive exhibitions (Black et al., 2016; Kelton & Nemirovsky, 2023), highlighting how informal settings can rework conventional boundaries of inclusion. Developed in response to enduring representation of mathematics as an elite pursuit, the notion draws inspiration from the British community arts movement, which sought to democratise cultural production by embedding creative practices within local communities and affirming the value of diverse cultural expressions developed outside mainstream institutions (Matarasso, 2018). In this light, community mathematics redirects attention to how mathematical participation can be supported and celebrated beyond formal schooling, becoming visible in initiatives that support young people’s engagement with mathematics through creative, collective and interdisciplinary practices. 

The paper asks what does community mathematics look like in practice? And what forms of mathematical possibility and participation do such practices open? Conceptually, the analyses of community mathematics presented in this paper are supported by work in mathematics education that has contributed to expanded understandings of mathematics, drawing attention to its embodied, material, aesthetic, and affective dimensions (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014; Sinclair, 2018). This body of work opens an important conceptual space for recognising and celebrating forms of mathematical engagement that do not align with dominant school norms.

Empirically, the paper draws on the Very Local Maths project (https://verylocalmaths.org.uk/) developed in collaboration with a community center in Manchester. The project involved collaborating with a group of seven young people aged 13-16, many of whom had SEND and experienced disrupted school trajectories. Over seven months, we co-developed and facilitated six interdisciplinary workshops exploring mathematics with practices such as music, poetry or origami. Using video-based micro-ethnographic analysis (Lebaron, 2012), the paper examines two selected episodes from these workshops to assemble a situated portrait of community mathematics. The first centres on a session in which young people each produced an origami creation, followed by a collective discussion about how much they might price one another’s pieces. The second follows a young person designing a net to construct a cube, where inventive and materially situated forms of measurement appear alongside childhood memories. The analysis attends to bodily and material dimensions of interaction.

The paper engages debates on inclusion in mathematics education by using our concept of community mathematics to interrogate how mathematical participation can be recognised and sustained beyond formal schooling. By grounding this analysis in fine-grained empirical detail, it contributes to reframing inclusion not as a sole question of access to mainstream forms of mathematics, but as a situated process through which mathematical possibilities themselves are questioned and reworked. 

The empirical material analysed in this paper comes from the Very Local Maths project, a community-based research initiative developed in collaboration with a community centre. Over a period of seven months, we worked on a voluntary basis with a group of seven young people aged 13-16, many of whom had SEND and disrupted school trajectories. They took part in a series of monthly workshops exploring and inventing mathematics through interdisciplinary activities connected to their interests and lived realities. These activities included practices such as origami, music, and poetry, combined individual and collective work, and were co-facilitated and co-designed with invited artists and mathematics students. The workshops were conceived as experimental spaces in which our concept of community mathematics could be tested, questioned, and exemplified through practice, rather than applied as a predefined framework. The methodological orientation of the project has strong affinities with what Debaise and Stengers (2017) describe as speculative pragmatism. This orientation treats inquiry as a process that resists early decisions about what should count as relevant and supports sustained attention to elements of practice that insist and demand consideration as the work unfolds. At the outset of the project, it was not known how our concept of community mathematics would take form in the work with the young people, nor which activities or forms of participation would take form. This uncertainty was taken seriously as a methodological resource and informed an analytic approach in which the unfolding activities and conversations were followed closely, without being excluded in advance, to examine how mathematical participation is practically produced in situ. The analysis draws on video-based micro-ethnography (LeBaron, 2012) to examine how mathematical activity and participation are produced through interaction. This approach is grounded in the assumption that broader issues such as inclusion are not abstract conditions, but are enacted through the fine-grained details of interaction. Our analysis attends to the organisation and negotiation of action at close scale, including talk, bodily orientation, pauses, and the use of material. Two episodes were selected for close analysis because they foreground different configurations of mathematical activity and participation in the workshops, one collective and one individual. Examined moment by moment, they support the development of a situated account of community mathematics grounded in the interactional details through which participation is shaped.

The paper offers a situated account of community mathematics as it is produced through concrete practices and interactions beyond formal schooling. Its contribution lies in giving texture and colour to what community mathematics can look like in practice. The analysis of the two episodes offers situated examples through which informal mathematical activity becomes visible, recognisable and discussable. These examples are not proposed as solutions or models to be replicated, although they might inspire alternative mathematical practices. They are offered as productive examples to think with, that support attentiveness to how young people might engage with mathematics in ways that escape institutional recognition and normalisation. In doing so, the paper offers concrete points of reference for thinking about mathematical inclusion beyond dominant educational frames and norms. More broadly, the paper opens space for thinking about how directing attention towards these alternative practices might contribute to a revitalised culture of mathematics and new insights in relation to questions of inclusion. It reframes questions of inclusion by shifting attention away from what young people are assumed to lack, and towards a landscape of other possibilities for engaging with and inventing mathematics in ways that are meaningful and connected to their lives. Community mathematics is proposed as a lens through which different relationships to mathematics can be cultivated and sustained. The paper invites attentiveness to how mathematics might circulate in community settings and how research in mathematics education might learn from these alternative practices. In doing so, the paper offers a grounded way of rethinking inclusion through attention to the mathematical possibilities that emerge in community-based practice.

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