One response to concerns about equity in mathematics education has been to challenge "dominant numeracies," in parallel to the rather more established challenges to dominant literacies exemplified in the work of the New Literacy Studies (see Street, 2003, for an overview). Such challenges have not been made without debate, however, and it is useful to inspect these debates in terms of their implications for mathematics before moving on to the case of mathematics itself. As shall show, the central issues concern whether an emphasis on "voice” and authorship acts as a force for change or whether it neglects the role of genre in the shaping of meaning by language and is thereby merely "authorizing disadvantage" (Gilbert, 1994).