Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Urban Education
Advisor
Konstantinos Alexakos
Committee Members
Gene Fellner
Beth Ferholt
Keywords
liberatory methodology, liberatory pedagogy, embodied knowledge, educational justice, multimodal methods, visual testimonio, textile arts, wellbeing
Abstract
Bridging the divide between art and science, my dissertation weaves together multiple worldviews to explore the generative possibilities of radical imagining in the learning sciences. In response to the harm caused by a positivist worldview that, all too often, reduces people to "objects of study," I center collaborative seeing and making as a methodological response to the extractive nature of research. Grounded in liminal spaces of becoming, I explore the physical, intellectual, and spiritual tensions that arise when dominant ways of being and knowing are disrupted by ancestral memory, lived experiences, and creative practices.
Across three published manuscript-style chapters, I examine four themes with respect to education as a practice of freedom: listening and collective agency, epistemic erasure and freedom, wellbeing and liberation, and student-centered pedagogy. Theorizing art as a way of being and participating in the world, I position artmaking as both a site of inquiry and a liberatory methodology—one that centers relationality, embodiment, and the pursuit of epistemic freedom in education. As an artist | teacher | advisor | researcher, my scholarship combines autoethnography, playwriting, and artmaking as paths for contemplation and transformative action.
Chapter One presents my personal and theoretical backgrounds in loving and embodied ways to situate the research that follows. In Chapter Two, I enter into dialogue with myself, my community, and my non-human relatives—including plants, rivers, and birds—through map-poems to illustrate how artmaking can help document injustice and increase methodological transparency in our research. In Chapter Three, I examine the arpilleras (tapestries) in the digital archive at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile to participate in archival repair and the recovery of stories through a one-act play. The arpilleras in this archive are visual testimonios that capture acts of survival, creativity, and resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). In Chapter Four, three textiles serve as heuristics to examine how artmaking contributes to educational research as a practice of freedom and wellbeing. I argue that embracing an arts-based research framework is as an act of transgression, challenging dominant paradigms and affirming the legitimacy of embodied, intuitive, and relational ways of knowing. In my closing chapter, I examine what it means to live, teach, and learn from a liminal space of transformation and possibility. I present an evolving understanding of education and educational research as loving, relational, and liberatory practices, where relationality shapes not only what we know but who we become as teachers and learners.
Recommended Citation
Tapias, Mariatere, "Knowing Through Making: Weaving a Pedagogy of Love, Embodiment, and Freedom Through Arts-Based Research" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6561
