Knowing Through Making: Weaving a Pedagogy of Love, Embodiment, and Freedom Through Arts-Based Research

(Dissertation)

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 tensions—physical, intellectual, and spiritual—that arise when dominant ways of being and knowing are disrupted by ancestral memory, lived experiences, and creative practices. 

Through storytelling as both a personal and political act of recovery, I examine how epistemic agency, erasure, repair, and freedom emerge in the spaces between silences and speaking out; schooling and learning; violence and care; and the material and imagined. 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. 

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: On Coming to Know

Chapter 2: Tying Knots and Weaving Ends: Toward a Holistic Paradigm of Arts-Based Research

Chapter 3: Repairing Threads in the Arpillera Archive: Arts-Based Methods for Transformation

Chapter 4: Towards a Theory of Arts-Based Methods as a Space of Wellbeing and Liberation 

Chapter 5: Threading a Loving, Relational, and Liberatory Pedagogy Through Story

Mariatere Tapias, PhD

Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center

Tying Knots and Weaving Ends 

Toward a Holistic Paradigm of Arts-Based Research 

Mariatere Tapias

Abstract

In chapter two, I discuss the role of listening, collective agency, and well-being in my journey from textile artist to arts-based researcher. Using autoethnography, critical cartography, and heuristics, I select four textile map-poems to illustrate how making art can help us document the physical and emotional qualities of injustice, analyze our data holistically, and increase methodological transparency in our work. This study of the unnatural divide/border between art and science discusses how art can distinctively contribute to our work as researchers. With a focus on visual narratives and reflexivity, this work transcends positivist notions of what is real, constitutes knowledge, and is of value in educational research.

Keywords

heuristics – listening – well-being – agency – visual narratives – critical cartography – justice – arts-based research

Tapias, M. (2022). Tying knots and weaving ends: Toward a holistic paradigm of arts-based research. In K. Tobin & K. Alexakos (Eds.), Transforming learning and teaching: Heuristics for educative and responsible practices (pp. 323-336). Brill.

Repairing Threads in the Arpillera Archive

Arts-Based Methods for Transformation

Mariatere Tapias

Abstract

In chapter three, I examine the arpilleras (tapestries of appliquéd fabric on burlap) in the digital archive at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMDH) in Chile, alongside the absence of arpilleristas’ (arpillera makers) recorded histories and knowledge. The arpilleras in this archive are visual testimonios that capture acts of survival, death, creativity, and resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). Blending elements of arts-based and archival research methods, I explore how knowledge, memory, and history are presented and omitted in the archive and in other projects at the museum. Through a one-act play, I travel back in time to Chile in the 1980s, to enter the living archive and engage with artists and histories undergoing erasure. Resisting the fear that adding fictional qualities to social inquiry may disqualify it as legitimate research, my methods are driven by the need to disrupt the normalization of inequity. Through a proposed ‘de-obfuscation theory’ lens, I examine the archival principle of respect des fondes, as I work to repair archival silences at the MMDH.

Keywords

archival silence – arpilleras – testimonio – de-obfuscation theory – arts-based research  –  respect des fondes

Tapias, M. (in press). Repairing threads in the arpillera archive: Arts-Based methods for transformation. In K. Tobin & K. Alexakos (Eds.), Educating for Life and Death. Brill Publishers.

Towards a Theory of Arts-Based Methods as a Space of Wellbeing and Liberation

Mariatere Tapias

Abstract

In chapter four, I confront the dis-ease caused by the ever-present gaze of positivism in academia. By engaging in dialogue with three textile art pieces, I first examine how arts-based methods contribute to educational research as a practice of freedom and wellbeing. Then, I discuss why choosing art as a primary tool for investigation is an act of transgression. With a focus on process, this study conceptualizes the designing of methods as a key point of encounter; the often ignored space where participants’ varied assumptions, values, and worldviews first meet, vital decisions are made, and research stories begin. Hence, I am driven by the urgency to strengthen the case for arts-based research.

Keywords

Textile Paintings – Heuristics – Wellbeing – Freedom – Arts-based Methods

Tapias, M. (2025). Towards a theory of arts-based methods as a space of wellbeing and liberation. In G. Fellner (Ed.), Arts-based research and the practice of freedom in education (pp. 147–158). Brill.