Discriminatory networks in mathematics education research

International audienceThis paper is written in an organisational language developed in the context of mathematics education by Dowling (2009, 2013) – social activity method (SAM) – as a commentary on Radford's (2008, 2014) discussion of theoretical networking. An exemplar is given of SAM's approach of recontextualising, and thus learning from, what it finds of interest elsewhere – here, Chevallard's Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD). The approach puts emphasis on the autonomy and emergent quality of well-formed research activity. SAM is not, however , solipsistic: it is designed to recursively self-organise in relation to what it encounters elsewhere but on the explicit basis of its own principles. By biasing a reading of ATD, SAM's organisational language develops in the form of a discriminatory research network