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This article identifies a self-sustaining system of deficit narratives about students of color as an entry point for studies of cognition to engage with the sociopolitical context of mathematical learning. Principles from sociopolitical perspectives and Critical Race Theory, and historical analyses of deficit thinking in education research, support the investigation into the system. Using existing research about students' understanding of a limit in calculus as context, this article proposes a definition of a deficit perspective on sense making and unpacks some of its tenets. The data illustration in this article focuses on the mathematical sense making of a Chicana undergraduate student. The analysis uses an anti-deficit perspective to construct a sensemaking counter-story by a woman of color. The counter-story challenges existing deficit master-narratives about the mathematical ability of women of color. The article closes with a proposal for an anti-deficit method for studying the sense making of students of color.

In this paper, we argue for a need to attend to issues of equity in postsecondary mathematics education. In the United States, the broader mathematics education field has begun a shift toward attending to sociopolitical aspects of research, which focus on the interrelatedness of knowledge, identity, power, and social discourses. We argue that explicit uptake of sociopolitical perspectives has the potential to offer new insights to current research and to advance efforts to address inequities in meaningful and theoretically well-informed ways. Situating our argument within the social and political context of the United States, we draw on existing studies that examine inequities in undergraduate mathematics classrooms. We highlight studies that focus on the impact of social discourses and institutional contexts on the negotiations of power and identity in postsecondary mathematics. We end by proposing future research directions and discuss challenges for equity work in postsecondary mathematics education.Issues of equity are becoming increasingly pressing in the political landscape and national discourse in the United States. In particular, various forms of professional and economic opportunity are intertwined with issues related to race and gender. Evidence of these relationships spans contexts ranging from trends in police brutality and incarceration (Chaney and Robertson 2013; Pettit and Western 2004) to pay Int.

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