‘Sum Anxiety’: Connecting emotions and mathematical identity through filmed-drama.

This paper comprises both a written and filmed piece.
‘Performatics: Performing stories of mathematical identity through filmed drama’ (Performatics) documents the ‘identity work’ of three postgraduate students (actors), who study mathematical courses, as they developed dramatic scenes framed in terms of their ‘shared feelings’ about mathematics. As Arts Based Research (ABR), ‘Performatics’ is a whole research process constituting data collection, analysis, discussion and dissemination. Two ABR methods were adopted. Firstly, ‘Playbuilding’ (Norris, 2000) structured the drama process in order to provoke, compile and construct scenes about experiences with mathematics. Secondly Jean Rouch’s observational cinema (Henley, 2009) captured the drama construction process and accounted for the actor’s imagination (dream like scenes of past experience) as part of their identity. ‘Performatics’ intends to contribute methodological approaches to mathematical identity research by claiming that there are features of filmed-drama that can show the intangible, inner aspect of identity that maybe include a wider grasp of emotions and cultural semiotics.