Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

Program Name/Specialization

Community Psychology

Faculty/School

Faculty of Arts

First Advisor

Dr. Natalie Kivell

Advisor Role

Supervisor

Second Advisor

Dr. Ciann Wilson

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Third Advisor

Dr Manuel Reimer

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor

Dr. Jesica Fernández

Advisor Role

External Reviewer

Abstract

This thesis asks how embracing Relational Epistemology, through accountable Pluri-Epistemic Dialogue, expands the Emancipatory aims of the Psychology of Liberation and deepens Liberational Praxis. Grounded in thirty years of Liberational Praxis, it brings the Psychology of Liberation into accountable encounter with Indigenous and Postcolonial Relational Epistemologies, without claiming Indigenous identity, authority, ceremony, or ownership. Within this situated encounter, Pensar Bonito (Tidy Thinking) illuminates movements from Martín-Baró’s Historical Memory toward Territorial and Ancestral Memory, from Freirean Dialogue toward walking the Word, from Fals Borda’s sentipensante toward Body-Nature and Body-Us, and from decolonial critique toward practices of Care and Subversion. Through a Relational, Qualitative, Community-Based Participatory Research-informed design grounded in the Liberation Paradigm and Indigenous-informed Relational Methodologies, I hosted three Spanish-language Talking Circles as a Relational-Epistemic Device with four Latin American women scholar-practitioners. Circle 1 established the Theoretical, Relational, and Ethical ground for discussing Liberation; Circle 2 explored how Liberational-Relational Knowledge-s become lived, bodily, material, and relationally perceptible; and Circle 3 examined the duties, limits, discomforts, and consequences of accountable Pluri-Epistemic Dialogue. Following active listening and transcript correction, the analytic process developed through three recursive phases: (1) First-Cycle Coding and Provisional Categorization, (2) Second-Cycle Pattern Development, and (3) Integrative Thematic Synthesis. First-Cycle Value and Process Coding was conducted directly across the complete corpus, retaining In Vivo language as a strategy of epistemic fidelity. This process generated 261 meaningful, context-linked analytic entries, organized into 54 provisional categories and accompanied by 17 analytic memos. Second-Cycle analysis refined eight Preliminary Praxical Intuitions into nine Analytic Roots, which were examined through Bridge Matrices. Integrative Thematic Synthesis brought these

Roots into a final architecture of five interconnected, situated, co-theorized theoretical premises. A Fourth Debriefing Circle returned the premises to the co-theorists, enabling collective recognition, response, correction, and commitment without adding them to the empirical database. The five premises are (1) Liberation as Accountable Relational Coherence; (2) Liberation Becoming Flesh; (3) Slowness as Methodological and Political; (4) Rhizomatic Liberation Through Discomfort, Limits, and Non-Appropriation; and (5) Relational Accountability Exceeds the Human. Read together, they re-situate the Subject of Liberation through Body, Territory, Memory, Ancestry, and Human and More-Than-Human Relations; reconfigure Liberational Praxis as relationally coherent, temporally accountable, and non-extractive; and deepen its ethics through positionality, reciprocity, refusal, return, non-appropriation, and consequence. The resulting situated interpretive frame is named Liberation-in-Relationality: neither proprietary nor universal, but accountable to the Histories, Languages, Territories, Relations, and responsibilities through which it becomes meaningful.

Convocation Year

2027

Convocation Season

Spring

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