Mathematics, migration, and Voices: digital storytelling as belonging and epistemic resistance for Muslim immigrant girls

For many Muslim immigrant girls in U.S. schools, mathematics is shaped by cultural and social dynamics that misinterpret their ways of knowing. This study offers a critical analysis of digital storytelling, as a perspective rarely applied in mathematics education. Drawing on narrative inquiry with five Muslim immigrant girls at a Midwestern community centre, we examine how creating digital mathematics stories becomes a means of negotiating belonging, naming epistemic injustice, and reclaiming interpretive authority. Using story circles as decolonial spaces, we analyse digital stories and discussions through lenses of belonging, epistemic injustice, counter-storytelling, and intersectionality. Their narratives show how school practices systematically misrecognise their mathematical competence, cultural knowledge, and emotional labour. Through digital storytelling, participants authored counter-narratives that challenged deficit framings and reframed mathematics as a space of identity and resistance. We argue that digital storytelling functions as an epistemic intervention, expanding whose stories are heard, and what mathematics can become.