A pandemic is currently grinding public life to a halt. Schools and universities are closed in many countries. Conferences are canceled or postponed. We empathize with people who have lost dear ones or turned ill, and with those who struggle to keep life going, for themselves and their dear ones. Organizers of many conferences have seen their huge efforts evaporate by one single decision, necessary to slow down the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Many participants had already booked flights and hotels-all gone. What will happen to all the research insights currently written down in ICME and PME papers?In this editorial, we raise the question, What are the consequences for mathematics education and for research, now and in the future? Informal email conversation with colleagues across the globe (including China and Italy) points to many challenges and concerns that relate to life and to education. Most of the challenges are transdisciplinary, but some have unique characteristics for mathematics learning. There is research on mathematics learning at a distance through non-traditional media, but we expect that the consequences of this pandemic will inspire more such research. Many of our conversations these days turn to deep reflection in an attempt to stay calm and clear-headed. In this editorial, we summarize a few experiences that people have shared with us, hoping that proper study will help people formulate lessons for today and tomorrow. This is particularly challenging in times where change is so rapid. As educators and researchers, we find ourselves in a tension eloquently formulated by Søren Kierkegaard: "It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards"

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With our conceptualization of Harré and van positioning theory, we draw attention to immanent experience and read transcendent discursive practices through the moment of interaction. We use a series of spatial images as metaphors to analyze the way positioning is conceptualized in current mathematics education literature and the way it may be alternatively conceptualized. This leads us to claim that changing the way mathematics is talked about and changing the stories (or myths) told about mathematics is necessary for efforts to change the way mathematics is done and the way it is taught.With growing awareness of the significance of social interaction in the development of mathematical understanding, researchers in mathematics education are attending increasingly to the nature of interpersonal positioning within classroom relationships. In addition to explicit attention to positioning, the word 'position' sneaks into conversations about dispositions, impositions, juxtapositions, oppositions, propositions, and transpositions.These position words are similar to each other because they are all nouns, but dispositions seem more stable than propositions, juxtapositions, transpositions, and oppositions because people talk about having dispositions. By contrast, an imposition, proposition, juxtaposition, or opposition is made-made in relation to other people or to other people's arguments. This difference raises questions for us about how these words Educ Stud Math (2009) 72:1-15

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There have been many studies of the development of an industrial work force with all its attendant hardships as newly proletarianized peasants were thrown off the land and into factory labor. The author postulates that a similar process occurred in the creation of at least one modern "profession"--nursing--as the traditional autonomy of private practive nursing was displaced by institutional nursing in hospitals and nursing homes. Prior to the Depression, most nurses worked in private duty--as independent entrepreneurs--without the regimentation, rigid division of labor, and intense supervision characteristic of modern hospitals. The collapse of the U.S. economy made it impossible for most nurses to continue to earn a living privately at the same time that hospitals required cheap labor power in order to develop as viable businesses. Despite the promise of job security in hospital work, most nurses resisted the change by criticism, sabotage, walking away from job, and attempts at unionization. Hospitals sought in response to inculcate loyalty by a variety of methods, including screening of applicants, in-service training, and professional ideology. In some instances, hospitals coerced private nurses into "staff" jobs by threatening their ability to secure business on their own. By the end of World War II, the majority of nurses were employed, for the first time, as wage earners for institutions. The entire period was marked by such discord and revolt on the part of nurses, however, that the American Nurses' Association was transformed as an organization in order to avoid massive unionization. The study points out that this unwritten history of nursing has been obscured by professional nursing leaders who are still suppressing revolts of rank-and-file nurses against the conditions of hospital work.