Advanced Diploma in Childhood and Human Rights

We begin by acknowledging the diversity present in the Latin American and Caribbean context, as well as the historical construction of a discourse of inequality and violence as characteristics of underdevelopment. This discourse has legitimized foreign economic and political intervention in these territories through processes of colonization of the cultures, bodies, identities, and subjectivities of their inhabitants. The discourse of violence has also naturalized its practice in everyday relationships by considering it an intrinsic characteristic of the human condition and a feature present in the evolutionary processes of societies. In turn, this discourse of naturalization has allowed for the invisibility of the presence of inequalities and violence.

In this context, hegemonic narratives about children and their socializing agents have been constructed, legitimized, and reproduced from deficit-based perspectives, such as those that portray children as having their rights violated, positioning them as emotionally, cognitively, and politically dependent and immature, and therefore demanding guardianship and protection; or as posing a risk to the contexts in which they participate, due to their experiences of violence and inequality. These narratives have disregarded their experiences, knowledge, needs, and expectations as social actors. Regarding families, these narratives fail to recognize their potential as settings for human development and, therefore, relegate them to a private sphere separate from the public sphere. In this sense, the family is viewed from a functional and institutional perspective that positions it as the quintessential space for satisfying basic needs, for the social reproduction of the species, for regulating sexuality and controlling parenthood, etc., ignoring the educational and socialization practices that families develop daily and that can be vital spaces for the formation of political subjects.

These hegemonic discourses have led to children and their families being portrayed as victims, and in some cases as perpetrators, in contexts of violence and inequality. This leaves them in a position of dependence and passivity in relation to adults. In other words, throughout the history of our nations, these individuals have played a reproductive role, but they have not been recognized as agents with the capacity to generate political and cultural practices of resistance and re-existence.

Practices related to the ways in which children narrate the world while being narrated by it bring into debate a series of theoretical and methodological approaches and perspectives, whose approach understands that such narratives operate historically and politically and always involve an exercise of power and emancipation.

In general, the presence of violence and inequalities—racial, gender-based, generational, among others—and their intersectionality has led to the silencing of the voices of children and their families, for their own protection or the protection of their loved ones. This has resulted in their lived experiences being forgotten. Truth has been considered a single, monolithic truth, and it is not perceived as present in children who are considered dependent, immature, or dangerous. Consequently, their perspectives and practices have been sidelined in the history of our continent.

Recognizing the situations described, problematizing, understanding, addressing, empowering, and transforming the objective and subjective conditions in which children and families construct their identity and subjectivity during times of pandemic, simultaneously raises questions about the subject-politics-culture-memory relationship, as well as about theories of human development, conceptions of the subject, the family, subjectivity, scenarios, socialization processes, and political-cultural-communicative mediations, and about the socio-historical context in which they occur. Given this context, the Advanced Diploma invites us to consider how children and their families living in contexts of high vulnerability and violence manage their human development with others and construct and narrate their political identities and subjectivities in a generative way, thereby mobilizing political and cultural practices of resistance and re-existence. Bearing in mind the importance of confronting and deactivating, through joint action between the government, civil society, the international community, academia and the children, families and educational agents themselves, the everyday normalization of the violation of rights rooted in inequality and violence, and whose direct consequences are perceived in the establishment of social dynamics of exclusion and depoliticization.

GENERAL PURPOSE:

To open the reflection on the social construction of children in contexts of rights violations, violence and inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean in times of pandemic, within which children's subjectivities and identities emerge in processes of political socialization and construction of political and cultural practices of resistance and re-existence.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

1. To build perspectives from the social sciences, relevant to the Latin American and Caribbean context, that guide studies on childhood in contexts of inequality and violence, aimed at political socialization and the political and cultural practices of resistance and re-existence as ways for social transformation from a rights-based approach
2. To complicate the view of the socialization processes of children in contexts of inequality and violence, based on the recognition of the importance of relational processes in the construction of their subjectivities, identifying the transformative potential of relationships in settings such as the family and the school and the participation of children and young people as active social agents in the construction of the country.
3. To explore the political projects and demands of children, their public modes of expression through participation and the transformation of their conditions of (re)existence.

The Higher Diploma in Childhood and Human Rights 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.

• María Camila Ospina Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia)
• Sara Victoria Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia)
• Alejandra Barcala (UNLa, Argentina)
• Daniel Llanos Erazo (ICSHE/UPS, Ecuador)
• Karina Batthyány (CLACSO - UDELAR, Uruguay)
• Susana Sosenski (UNAM, Mexico)
• Karina Bidaseca (CONICET, Argentina)
• Alejandro Cussianovich (Peru)
• Alberto Minujín (The New School University)
• Germán Guarín (Colombia)
• Mariana Rey Galindo (Argentina)
• Juan Carlos Amador (CINDE, Colombia)
• Rosana Mendoza (UARM, Peru)
• Keyla Rosa Estévez García (ICCP, Cuba)
• Ana Rita Russo de Sánchez (UNINORTE, Colombia)
• Claudia Calquín Donoso (USACH, Chile)
• Martha Martinez (Spain)
• Agustín Barna (FFyL/UBA, Argentina)
• Elsa Castañeda Bernal (Colombia)
• Jhoana Patiño (CINDE, Colombia)
• Indira Granda (CINDE, Venezuela)
• José Machain (FLACSO, Argentina)
• Karina Benavides (UPS, Ecuador)

The program consists of 4 modules and its classes are held weekly; each module is taught consecutively and they are linked together.

Total workload of 128 hours.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are: