Advanced Diploma in Critical Cartographies and Territories in Tension

• Class 1: Memory, space, power and urbanism
  Teacher: Rolando Durán Cavieres
  
  This class introduces a critical reading of memory as a spatial and political practice, analyzing its relationship with urbanism, power, and the production of space. It will explore how collective memories, particularly those linked to conflicts, dictatorships, and structural violence, are inscribed, contested, and resignified within urban and territorial space. The class will utilize memory maps, among other analytical tools, to understand how memory operates as an active field of dispute over the meaning of territory, capable of ordering spatial hierarchies, producing silences, and enabling practices of urban reappropriation from a critical Latin American perspective.
  
  
• Class 2: Cartographies of Justice: Critical Methods
  Teachers: Gonzalo Conte and Valeria Durán
  
  This course explores the use of cartography as a critical tool applied to processes of memory, truth, and justice. Drawing on experiences developed in Argentina, it analyzes cartographic methodologies aimed at the spatial reconstruction of state violence and crimes against humanity. The course emphasizes the political nature of maps, not only as representational devices but also as evidentiary, narrative, and analytical tools in judicial and historical memory processes. Cartography will be examined as a situated, collective, and methodologically rigorous practice capable of challenging official narratives, revealing spatial patterns of violence, and contributing to the production of historical truth and justice.
  
  
• Class 3: Political melancholy, mourning and urban space
  Teacher: Marco Álvarez Vergara
  
  This course offers a critical reflection on political melancholy and mourning as analytical categories for understanding historical, social, and urban processes associated with the Latin American left. From an approach that combines critical historiography and historical sociology, the course analyzes how experiences of defeat, the interruption of emancipatory projects, and political silencing are inscribed in urban spaces and collective subjectivities.
  Melancholy will be approached not as a merely individual or psychological disposition, but as a socially produced form of relating to the past, capable of structuring political memories, urban imaginaries, and everyday practices. The class explores how certain urban processes operate as material supports for these historical experiences, affecting the ways of inhabiting, remembering, and projecting the political in the contemporary city.

• Class 4: Creative destruction and spatialities of capital
  Teacher: Carlos Salamanca Villamizar
  
  The class addresses violence as a constitutive dimension of the capitalist production of space from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective. Based on the instructor's research, it analyzes processes of creative destruction, territorial reconfiguration, and spatial control associated with the expansion of capital in urban and rural contexts in Latin America.
  Special emphasis is placed on situated ethnographic work and the use of cartography and maps as analytical tools to understand how violence is organized, circulated, and contested within a territory. Space is examined as a key relationship between actors (the State, capital, communities, security apparatuses), allowing for an understanding of how practices, conflicts, and forms of power are inscribed both materially and symbolically. Through case studies developed on the platform "Violence in Space," the class explores the map not only as a representation but also as a critical tool for articulating relationships, making patterns of violence visible, and understanding complex territorial dynamics.
  
  
  
• Class 5: Geoactivism and territorial violence
  Teacher: Fidel Mingorance Cruz
  
  This class explores geoactivism as a political, methodological, and cartographic practice in response to contexts of territorial violence in Latin America, with a special focus on the cases of Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico (among others). Drawing on experiences in critical mapping, collaborative cartography, and the use of digital technologies, it analyzes contemporary forms of violence associated with armed conflict, drug trafficking, extractivism, militarization, and territorial control.
  The class explores the map as a tool for collective action and denunciation, examining how cartography allows us to make invisible forms of violence visible, articulate territorial memories, and challenge official narratives about space. From a situated perspective, it analyzes concrete experiences of geoactivism in Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico (among others), highlighting the role of communities, social organizations, and human rights collectives in producing critical spatial knowledge in the face of contexts of risk, threat, and conflict.
  
  
  
• Class 6: Violence, urban control and regimes of power representation
  Teacher: Maite Borjabad López-Pastor
  
  This class addresses the relationship between violence, urban control, and regimes of power representation, focusing on the spatial, visual, and curatorial devices through which violence becomes legible, governable, or, conversely, invisible in contemporary urban space. From a critical perspective, the class proposes to analyze how power is not only exercised materially over the territory (through infrastructure, security devices, urban planning, or surveillance technologies), but also through regimes of representation that organize what is visible, sayable, and imaginable in the city.
  Based on the research and curatorial work of Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, this course explores the role of architecture, design, and curatorial practice as strategic fields in the production of narratives about violence, the future, security, and urban order. Exhibitions, catalogs, and museographic devices are analyzed as political technologies that mediate between conflict, knowledge, and power, producing specific readings of urban and territorial space. The course proposes understanding curating and spatial representation not as neutral practices, but as critical operations capable of reproducing or challenging dominant imaginaries about violence, development, and the city. In this sense, cartography is used as a tool that allows for the denaturalization of these regimes of representation, highlighting their political effects and opening the possibility of counter-hegemonic readings of contemporary urban space.
  
  

• Class 7: Housing crisis and self-management of habitat
  Teacher: Nelson Carroza Athens
  
  This course addresses, analyzes, and reflects on the issue of housing in Latin America, understanding the housing crisis as a dimension of the contemporary polycrisis and, at the same time, self-management as a possible horizon: a path driven by collectives that contest the production of urban space and propose alternatives for producing habitat and housing. The course delves into the characteristics, grammars, and repercussions of the social housing crisis in the region, as well as its link to the reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities. In parallel, it examines the self-management of habitat and its articulation with urban-popular movements, understood as collective subjects that challenge both the materiality of the city and the political and social meanings attributed to it.
  The guiding questions are: What are the political grammars and disputes that structure the housing crisis in Latin America? And how is habitat production organized autonomously in the face of the exhaustion of traditional state policies and the commodification of housing? Based on these questions, the discourses that shape the housing crisis, its main features, and the social processes, collective practices, and repertoires of action that emerge as alternative responses are analyzed, especially in contexts marked by profound regional inequalities.
  
  
  
• Class 8: Territories of uneven development
  Teacher: Jorge Leal Fagúndez
  
  This course addresses uneven development as a historically and territorially produced process, focusing on the role of the state, public policies, and productive transformations in shaping socio-spatial inequalities in Latin America. From a critical perspective, it questions the idea of ​​development as a homogeneous or neutral process, showing how economic, labor, and productive dynamics are distributed unevenly across the territory, generating persistent patterns of concentration, exclusion, and marginalization.
  This paper proposes to analyze how territorial development policies, far from automatically correcting inequalities, often contribute to reproducing or spatially entrenching them. It examines the relationships between productive structure, employment, and territory, highlighting the importance of different scales of analysis for understanding the processes of uneven development.
  This course proposes understanding territory not as a passive support, but as a social construct shaped by asymmetrical power relations, political decisions, and distributive conflicts. Through comparative approaches in Latin America, it reflects on how different development models generate differentiated impacts on regions, cities, and communities, and how these inequalities condition the possibilities for collective action, self-management, and territorial democracy. In this way, the course provides a structural framework for understanding the territorial disputes addressed in this Advanced Diploma program.
  
  
  
• Class 9: Housing, community participation and social mapping
  Teacher: Paulina Cárdenas Ovalle
  
  This course addresses community participation as a central dimension of the social production of territory, with a special emphasis on housing, habitat, and collective action processes in urban and peri-urban contexts. From a critical perspective, the course problematizes institutional approaches to participation that reduce community intervention to consultative or instrumental mechanisms, proposing instead to understand it as a situated, conflictive, and deeply territorialized process. Within this framework, social cartography is addressed as a methodological and political tool that allows for the visualization of actors, conflicts, memories, resources, and socio-spatial inequalities from the perspective of local knowledge.
  This class proposes understanding social cartography not only as a data collection technique, but also as a tool for mediating and politicizing territory, capable of strengthening organizational processes, challenging expert narratives, and opening spaces for the production of the commons. In this way, social intervention, housing, and territorial planning are brought into dialogue with critical cartographic practices that expand the possibilities for effective participation and territorial democracy, preparing the way for the Right to the City module.
  
  

• Class 10: Urban Social Movements and Spatial Justice
  Teacher: Fernanda Valeria Torres
  
  This class addresses the right to the city from the perspective of urban and socio-territorial social movements, understood as collective actors that contest the production of urban space in the face of commodification, segregation, and socio-spatial inequality. The class proposes a critical reading of the right to the city not as an abstract normative framework, but as a situated political practice, constructed through concrete territorial struggles in Latin American urban contexts.
  This class proposes understanding spatial justice as an analytical category that allows for the articulation of social, economic, and territorial inequalities, moving beyond legal or institutionalist interpretations of the right to the city. Within this framework, urban movements are addressed not only as subjects of resistance but also as producers of alternative territorialities, capable of challenging meanings, practices, and ways of inhabiting the city. The session inaugurates the Right to the City module by connecting the territorial practices analyzed previously with contemporary urban disputes in Latin America.
  
  
  
• Class 11: Right to the city today: disputes and limits
  Teacher: Juan Manuel Delgado Estrada
  
  This course offers a critical and contemporary reading of the right to the city, addressing its current disputes, structural limitations, and political potential in Latin American contexts. Far from understanding it as a consolidated legal right or a consensus-based slogan, the course approaches the right to the city as a field of tensions, traversed by power relations, historical inequalities, and persistent territorial disputes.
  This course analyzes the limitations of hegemonic approaches to the right to the city when applied without considering the specific historical, social, and territorial trajectories of Latin America, highlighting how these omissions tend to reproduce inequalities and spatial hierarchies. The class aims to help participants understand the right to the city as a critical practice, historically and territorially situated, capable of articulating urban struggles, political imaginaries, and collective projects.
  
  
  
• Class 12: Affective and sensitive cartographies in the dispute over territory
  Teacher: Valeria Consuelo de Pina Ravest
  
  This class explores affective and sensory cartographies as practices of knowledge, spatial production, and territorial dispute that integrate not only the functional or structural dimension of urban space, but also the experiences, memories, emotions, and subjective connections that shape senses of place and lived territories. Far from understanding the map as a neutral representation of space, affective cartographies produce narratives, connections, and networks that bring body, memory, and landscape into dialogue, enabling alternative ways of occupying, narrating, and transforming territory. The class also reflects on the ethical and methodological implications of using affective cartographies in contexts of territorial dispute: How to represent what is not always visible? How to engage with institutional cartographies without diluting subjective experiences? What kinds of knowledge are legitimized or silenced in these processes?
  
  

• Class 13: Micropolitics, desire and everyday life
  Teacher: Paula Monroy
  
  This class proposes an approach to a derivation of utopia, heterotopia, from the micropolitics of desire and everyday life, shifting its understanding from grand normative narratives or totalizing projects toward the practices, affects, and relationships that shape the daily experience of individuals. Heterotopia is addressed here from its transformative power to create possible realities. It is the product of a relationship between forms and forces that manifests itself in ways of inhabiting, relating, organizing socially, and creating in specific contexts. The class will study how desire operates as a subjective political force that permeates bodies, spaces, and relationships, producing fissures in dominant social and spatial orders. Contemporary everyday life will be analyzed as a field of micropolitical struggle, where forms of control and normalization are reproduced, but where practices of reappropriation, care, cooperation, and collective creation also emerge. From this perspective, micropolitics do not replace structural struggles, but rather complement and sustain them, articulating tactics, affective, bodily and territorial relationships that allow us to imagine and try out other possible ways of life.
  Finally, the class invites us to think of heterotopia as a situated, fragile and multiple practice, which is built in everyday doing and in relation to others.
  
  
  
• Class 14: Urban environmental justice: territory, utopia and sustainability.
  Teacher: Fernanda Flores Zorrilla
  
  Understanding environmental justice—or socio-environmental injustice—with a special focus on the Global South and Santiago, Chile. The city is approached as an active cartography of power, where climate, pollution, access to green spaces, and quality of life are defined by a model of urban growth and by historical political planning decisions. A critical reading of climatic, environmental, and social phenomena is proposed, and the question is raised as to what extent the city is a malleable space and how, from territorial practices focused on sustainability, concrete urban utopias are being tested that challenge the existing order, allowing us to consider the city not only as a diagnosis of inequality but also as a contested political horizon.
  
  
  
• Class 15: Utopian Perspectives and Strategies
  Teachers: Fernanda Flores Zorrilla, Paula Monroy, Rolando Durán Cavieres and Marco Alvarez Vergara
  
  This final class proposes a synthesis that integrates the themes explored throughout the Diploma program, aiming to understand utopia not as an abstract ideal, but as a set of situated political perspectives and strategies oriented toward social and territorial transformation. Utopia is approached here as a critical practice that emerges from real conflicts, collective experiences, and concrete struggles over space, life, and the future. These perspectives allow us to understand utopia not as a closed model, but as an open field for political and territorial experimentation.
  The course emphasizes utopian strategies that unfold across multiple scales: from everyday micropolitics and community practices to social movements, alternative urban projects, and socio-environmental struggles. Experiences in critical cartography, environmental justice, territorial self-management, and the reappropriation of space are revisited as examples of utopias in action—partial and conflictive—that articulate memory, desire, and future. Thus, the Diploma's conclusion proposes a strategic perspective on utopia: not as a promise of harmony, but as a sustained practice of contestation, creation, and care, rooted in territories and lived experiences.
  
  

You must be registered in the CLACSO Single Registration System (SUIC) and enter your username and password. If you are not registered, click here. hereTo access the registration form, you must click the "Register" button on the webpage of the Diploma you are interested in.

Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.

Classes will begin in August and will conclude in December 2026.

All registered participants will receive, on the first day of activities, the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography, and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.

Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available. For inquiries, you can write to [email protected] 

 You must write an email with the request to [email protected] We will send you the requested certificate as soon as possible.

Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases and within the first 20 days of starting the Higher Diploma, the student may write to [email protected] Requesting withdrawal and stating the reasons. After the case is evaluated, a response will be sent to the request. If approved, the student may resume the Higher Diploma program if a new cohort is offered the following year. After that period of time has elapsed since the start of the course, no requests will be accepted.

Money paid will only be refunded in cases where the organizing institutions decide to cancel the activity. 

Yes, the advanced diploma is certified by CLACSO. The diploma will be sent digitally and is completely free of charge.

Payment can be made in one installment, by credit card or bank transfer. We also offer the option of paying in 3 installments.

Yes. There will be discounts for students belonging to CLACSO Member Centers and CLACSO Associated Centers, for CLACSO Associate Researchers, and for all those who pay within the discount period.

You can check if you belong to a member center here: 

https://www.clacso.org/institucional/centros-asociados/

The Advanced Diploma program integrates a dynamic of asynchronous and synchronous classes. Classes are primarily asynchronous. The schedule for synchronous sessions will be communicated by the Diploma coordinator at the beginning of the program, and participation in these sessions is not a prerequisite for passing the program.