Advanced Diploma in Disability: Critiques and Alternatives from Latin America

Disability encompasses multiple meanings and manifestations, ranging from lived experiences of becoming, emancipation, and liberation to diverse forms of oppression. As a sociopolitical category, it also endures embodied and systematic segregation, while maintaining the supremacy of racialized, gendered, heteronormative, capitalist, and ableist standards of humanity, geographically differentiated. Alongside the everyday racism of colonial territories, ageism, feminized care economies, and the unequal distribution of economic, sociopolitical, and cultural power, the injustices evident in the way individuals are not politically recognized have deepened. Within this framework, a critical and rights-based perspective becomes even more relevant. Continuities and ruptures between past and present, as well as between North and South, and comparative analyses between countries, will be present in all modules.
This Diploma program is situated within the field of critical disability studies in Latin America and the Caribbean. These studies are currently experiencing a period of proliferation and strengthening, stemming from the convergence of multiple critical perspectives and social struggles for social, economic, ecological, and epistemic justice.
The diverse profiles of the teaching team presenting this proposal allow us to approach the same phenomenon from both interdisciplinary and de-disciplinary perspectives, bringing together individuals, groups, and institutions with different backgrounds, experiences, and levels of involvement with disability. Since its definition is controversial, we intend to extend this debate throughout the classes to contribute to a multi-vocal education, without flattening the disparities among us. Likewise, we examine disability from the boundaries between the academic and the political, orienting ourselves toward the production of multiple forms of knowledge. The teaching team includes people with disabilities, who speak from the perspective of what fundamentally challenges us, and people without disabilities.
We intend to create the conditions for the creation of a Network of postgraduate programs in disability that strengthens the academic and political training of researchers and social scientists in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also their organic links with the struggles and resistance of social disability movements, as well as their intersections with other organizations, networks and platforms of struggle: indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+, peasants, popular sectors, Afro-descendants, Asian-descendants, among others.
From a critical pedagogical perspective, we invite you to reflect deeply on the themes introduced as questions that can unite us as a learning community, serving as starting points for further collective reflections that contribute to the de/re/construction of shared understandings surrounding disability. Throughout these modules, we will utilize interactive, flexible, accessible, and alternative methodologies, along with a variety of digital tools, that guarantee the right to knowledge through dialogue and collective construction.

General objectives:

• Addressing disability from academic-political, epistemic-ontological, theoretical-methodological interstices, through critical positions and life experiences of people with and without disabilities.
• Raising awareness about disability through a confluence of multiple knowledge and experiences, in order to promote emancipatory and transformative potential.
  
  

Specific objectives:

• Sharing multiple approaches and places of enunciation of disability from critical disability studies, which allows students to obtain analytical and formative tools in order to generate their own reflections and controversies within the framework of the higher diploma.
• To problematize and dismantle the linear and evolutionary views on the history of disabilities, which have been dominant in the regional Social Sciences scene until now, providing inputs to incorporate the unique historical context into critical Latin American disability studies.
• Approaching disability from a feminist perspective, through an intersectional approach from Latin America, which considers ableist violence towards girls, women and gender-diverse individuals, and the anti-ableist and anti-cordial resistances to practices related to fragility and care.
• To approach the experiences, knowledge, struggles and resistances of the encounters/disencounters between indigenous peoples and disability, from an intercultural, decolonial and ancestral perspective, enabling the understanding of decolonization processes of health, education and care.
• To learn about some approaches that create leaks, openings and contributions to politically feel-think about disability and with it move towards critiques of the current Latin American economic, social, cultural and political context, through the recognition of policies, affects and individual or collective agencies with diverse modes of enunciation in disability.

The Higher Diploma in Disability: Critiques and Alternatives from Latin America is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students; teachers at all levels; activists and members of trade unions, social movements and political parties; public officials; members and managers of non-governmental organizations and professionals interested in the subject.

• Andrea Gómez (Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico)
• Christian Giorgio Jullian Montañez (National Pedagogical University, Mexico)
• Victor Alexander Yarza de los Rios (University of Antioquia, Colombia)
• Andrea Cristina Moctezuma Balderas (El Colegio de San Luis AC, Mexico)
• Michelle Lapierre (Catholic University of Temuco, Chile)
• Diana Vite Hernández (Femidiscas, Mexico)
• Constanza López (University of Valparaíso, Chile)
• Anahí Guedes de Mello (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil)
• Jhonatthan Maldonado Ramírez (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico)
• Zoila Romualdo Pérez (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
• Gildas Brégain (National Center for Scientific Research, France) 
• Carolina Ferrante (National University of Quilmes, Argentina)

The program consists of 5 modules of 4 weekly classes each, taught consecutively and linked together.

Total workload of 128 hours.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are:

• 1 Module: Approaches and positions on “disability”
• 2 Module: “Stories” of disability
• 3 Module: “Disability” from a feminist perspective
• 4 Module: Interculturalities and ancestralities from Abya Yala
• 5 Module: Politics, affections, and agencies