The Spaces of Mathematics: Dynamic Encounters Between Local and Universal

No doubt mathematics is the last place (or face?) to look for "situatedness", i.e., to show that mathematics too is linked to places, to people, to instruments, to practices. Yet over the past years evidence has been accumulating that mathematics too needs a context in order to be understood. This contextuality ranges from the high-level, abstract mathematical discourse that require a strong social closure in terms of experts to the educational context where mathematical thinking and doing is transmitted including the hidden philosophical and universal claims and to the ethnomathematical context where mathematics is supposed to integrate into society rather than the other way around. In short, universality requires some very special contextual conditions to demonstrate its full force (at least so it claims).