This article is a discussion in two parts. The first part addresses the Southern African indigenous philosophy of Ubuntu, providing it with a working definition and situating it within African epistemology and the socio-political contexts of its invocation. It raises critical concerns about Ubuntu's embrace in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its promulgation as an ideology within the nation-building project of post-apartheid South Africa. Such concerns are referenced with respect to Ubuntu's formulation within the advocacies of cultural nationalism. Nevertheless, the discussion commits to perspectives of possibility towards disrupting neoliberalism and decolonizing hegemonic meanings, and advances a debate towards transformation and transcendence within a post-apartheid context.The second part follows on from the arguments in the first part, which set the stage for a narrative journeying of a more personal nature. It offers a reflexive account of how Ubuntu was used as a guiding principle for engagement in fieldwork and the structuring of a qualitative research methodology. The narrative tone is somewhat different to that of the first part, which offers critical perspectives within a broad socio-political discussion. The second part moves from a national level to a local level. It locates more personal interactions and a search for a 'humble togetherness' within the context of a township school in South Africa. The article closes with a somewhat cautionary note on how a philosophy such as Ubuntu might be taken up in a political institutional forum that has unwanted implications, but it also advocates for Ubuntu in providing legitimizing spaces for transcendence of injustice and a more democratic, egalitarian and ethical engagement of human beings in relationship with each other. In this sense, Ubuntu offers hope and possibility in its contribution to human rights.

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Mathematics education has been notoriously slow at interpreting inclusion in ways that are not divisive. Dominant views of educational inclusion in school mathematics classrooms have been shaped by social constructions of ability. These particularly indelible constructions derive from the perceived hierarchical nature of mathematics and the naturalised assumption that mathematisation is purely an intellectual exercise. Constructions of ability, therefore, emanate from the epistemic structures of mathematics education as predominantly practiced worldwide, and the prevalence of proceduralism and exclusion in those practices. Assumptions about ‘ability’ have become a truth to mathematical aptitude held by mathematics teachers in schools. This includes schools across Scotland. In Scotland, the government owes the ‘included pupil’ a legal obligation to provide additional support for learning under section 1(1) of the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004. However, classroom practices deployed around socially-constructed notions of ability have seen schools moving away from an emphasis on ‘additional’ to an expansive interpretation of ‘different from’ in the language of section 1(3)(a) of the Act 2004. This shift, therefore, reinstalls exclusionary effects to school mathematics practices by creating the conditions for some pupils, constructed in terms of disabilities or low ability, to be afforded a more inferior education than others. While philosophical conversations around whether these practices are ethical, egalitarian or democratic might ensue, there is also the human rights angle, which asks whether such practices are even lawful.

Global citizenship' entered public parlance prominently during heightened globalisation. To be a citizen of this new globalised, interconnected world was to be a subject of capital. Like Janus, a subject of this neoliberal world order was to be both an inwardlygazing subject of the nation state, and simultaneously an outwardlygazing subject of global capital. 'Global citizenship' (GC) carries the inherent contradiction of Janus, being a juridical contradiction. It looks both inwards and outwards and carries borders as shadows. Viewing contradiction at the heart of GC as a 'productive tension', rather than 'flaw', by way of entry into Global Citizenship Education (GCE), and by implication Learning for Sustainability (LfS), may offer the necessary vector in prizing open new windows to hopeful, alternative futures. The difficult task of doing so should not be sidestepped in the shift from GCE to LfS. Recognition of the various 'distancing strategies' deployed within these discourses is critical in overcoming their overdetermination as instruments of state social, national and economic ambitions. The implications for education and our socio-ecological futures of the embrace of contradiction at the heart of GC needs critical attention toward the imperative of mobilising Critical GCE (CGCE) to enact possibilities of radically hopeful futures.

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