PhD Candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Mariatere Tapias is an arts-based teacher and educational researcher. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. At a young age, she picked up needles and thread to imagine and give shape to her world. Sewing was how mami made a living, and her grandmother Amá, made patchwork blankets to develop new ideas. In her family, textile work was more than a product centered art form but a practice of being in dialogue, community, inquiry, and care. Stitching was a process of looking back to critically examine and carry the knowledge of their ancestors forward, along with new findings, questions, and methods. Over time, she understood that each finished project was never an ending but an invitation towards something new, unexpected, and not yet fully visible. Mariatere brings this range of perspectives and practices to her research, as a methodology that facilitates new forms of embodiment, leaning into uncertainty, and critical consciousness in her scholarship.
With over twenty years of experience teaching textile arts as a social and contemplative practice, Mariatere has worked in a variety of New York City environments: as an early childhood teacher, in youth and adult workshop settings, and most recently at an Older Adult Center. As the founder of the Slow Textiles Art Collective, she asks: Who are we engaged in radical imagination with? What healing practices are we nurturing? Where do we carry laughter and love? How do we undo, mend, and make what we imagine? In 2021, Mariatere became a founding member of the restorative / transformative justice group in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center. With a commitment to community healing and engagement, she volunteers as a circle keeper with the New York Peace Institute. She turns to the land and ancestors to shape her sense of hope and direction.
Mariatere’s dissertation explores how artmaking as scholarship supports inclusivity, justice, and wellbeing in teaching and learning. In response to the harm caused by a positivist worldview that, all too often, reduces people to “objects of study,” she centers collaborative seeing and making as a methodological response to the extractive nature of research. Through an emergent and participatory framework, she examines four themes: listening and collective agency, erasure and inclusionary justice, educational research as a practice of freedom, and student thriving. Her scholarship combines autoethnography, playwriting, and artmaking as paths for contemplation and transformative action in and outside of the academy. Bridging the divide between art and science, her project weaves together multiple worldviews to explore the generative possibilities of radical imagining.
In her opening chapter, Mariatere creates map-poems to illustrate how artmaking can help us document injustice and increase methodological transparency in our work as researchers. In chapter 2, she examines the arpilleras (tapestries) in the digital archive at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile to investigate the consequences of institutional erasure. Then, through a one-act play, she participates in archival repair and the recovery of stories. In chapter 3, three paintings serve as heuristics to examine how artmaking contributes to educational research as a practice of freedom and wellbeing. In chapter 4, she centers BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) college students’ experiences in a reimagined research methods classroom, and how their perspectives regarding what a thriving learning environment looks, sounds, and feels like evolves over the course of a semester. Finally, in her closing chapter, she examines the transformative outcomes of artmaking as scholarship.