Advanced Diploma in Childhood and Human Rights
3th Cohort | Virtual Modality
ACADEMIC COORDINATION
María Camila Ospina-Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia) | Sara Victoria Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia) | Alejandra Barcala (University of Buenos Aires – National University of Lanús, Argentina) | Daniel Llanos Erazo (Center for Research in Social Sciences, Humanities and Education – Salesian Polytechnic University, Ecuador)
PROFESSORS
María Camila Ospina-Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia) | Sara Victoria Alvarado (CINDE, Colombia) | Alejandra Barcala (University of Buenos Aires-National University of Lanús, Argentina) | Daniel Llanos Erazo (Center for Research in Social Sciences, Humanities and Education – Salesian Polytechnic University, Ecuador) | Susana Sosenski (Autonomous University of Mexico) | Karina Batthyány (CLACSO-University of the Republic, Uruguay) | Mariana Rey Galindo (University of San Pablo-Tucumán, Argentina) | Alberto Minujín (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) | Karina Bidaseca (National University of San Martín) - University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) | Indira Granda (Central University of Venezuela) | Martha Martinez (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain) | Karina Benavides (University of Guayaquil, Ecuador) | José Machain (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) | Keyla Rosa Estévez García (Center for Youth Studies, Cuba) | Rosana Mendoza (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru)
Virtual format | May to September 2023
The advanced diploma program emerged as part of the CLACSO Working Group on Childhoods and Youth: Hegemonies, Violence, Inequalities, and Mobilizations and the REDINJU network. This group, with a 12-year history, currently brings together approximately 152 researchers from 15 countries. The group's work is organized around three lines of research, one of which focuses on reflections on hegemonies, violence, and political and cultural practices of resistance and reform.Existence, another on Collective Action, Participation, Public Policies and the State, and finally another focused on Social Inequalities and a Generational Approach. For its part, the Network of Postgraduate Programs in Childhood and Youth (RedINJU) is oriented towards promoting solidarity among postgraduate programs related to childhood and youth. belonging to different Ibero-American countries, stimulating cooperation alternatives that enhance the strengths of training programs and generate useful lessons for the Latin American and Caribbean context. The main purpose of this network is to discuss and build knowledge and training alternatives that will impact both child and youth policies, as well as the discourses and social practices linked to the care and education of children and young people on the continent, and the recognition of their rights to participate in the processes of building culture and the social and political order.
This advanced diploma program aims to contribute, through multiple perspectives developed in social research across various Latin American and Caribbean countries, to the understanding of the social construction of children in contexts of inequality and violence during the pandemic. It examines both macro-level elements involving national history and dynamics, and micro-level elements situated within the relational contexts and processes where rights violations are normalized as part of social life. The program seeks to understand not only the normalization of and impact on children in the face of violence, inequality, and rights violations, but primarily the ways in which children and their relational agents intersubjectively construct themselves and emerge as political subjects capable of contributing practices of resistance and re-existence. This is achieved through the creation of meanings and actions that enable alternative ways of inhabiting society—ways that do not involve the elimination of the antagonist, but rather acknowledge the valuable and necessary presence of children in social and personal life.
Understanding these phenomena and dynamics helps identify experiences and possible paths in the processes of political socialization and civic education for children, fostering new forms of relationships and participation in socializing settings such as the family, school, social networks, and spaces of cultural production and appropriation, among others, as well as new ways of distributing power between men and women, closer to democracy in our continent. Understanding these dynamics helps guide public policies, in these times of transformation, around certain questions: What place do the How do children participate in governing political projects? How do children assign meaning to their practices and experiences in relation to the hegemonic perspectives held by institutions, the media, and cultural industries? What possibilities exist today that enable the projects and demands of children in all their diversity? Through what narratives do these children inhabit the space/time of communication, culture, and politics? And finally, in what ways do such narratives promote participation, agency, and the transformation of their conditions of re-existence?
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 rendered the presence of inequalities and violence invisible.
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 positioned from a functional and institutional vision that places it as the space par excellence for the satisfaction of basic needs, for the social reproduction of the species, for the regulation of sexuality and the control of 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, a situation that leaves them in a position of dependency and passivity towards adults. That is to say, in the history of our nations these subjects have had a reproductive role, but have not been considered as subjects with the generative capacity for 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. In this sense, the Advanced Diploma invites us to consider the ways in which 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, thus 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, and academia And the same children, families and educational agents, 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
Reflecting on the social construction of children in contexts of rights violations, violence and inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean in times of pandemic, contexts in 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 (University of Buenos Aires-National University of Lanús, Argentina)
- Daniel Llanos Erazo (Center for Research in Social Sciences, Humanities and Education - Salesian Polytechnic University, Ecuador)
- Susana Sosenski (Autonomous University of Mexico)
- Karina Batthyány (CLACSO-University of the Republic, Uruguay)
- Mariana Rey Galindo (University of San Pablo-Tucumán, Argentina)
- Alberto Minujín (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- Karina Bidaseca (National University of San Martín) - University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- Indira Granda (Central University of Venezuela)
- Martha Martinez (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)
- Karina Benavides (University of Guayaquil, Ecuador)
- José Machain (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- Keyla Rosa Estévez García (Center for Youth Studies, Cuba)
- Rosana Mendoza (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru)
The program consists of 5 modules with weekly classes; each module is taught consecutively and they are interconnected.
Total workload of 128 hours.
The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are:
CLASS 1: Social construction of children: from victimization to generative narratives of early childhood, children, and their relational agents.
Teacher: María Camila Ospina
Class dynamics: Synchronous
The class addresses the social construction of children. It also includes the implications of social construction and the generativity of language in socialization contexts such as family and school, specifying emerging possibilities through conversations and relationships. Subsequently, it mentions strategies for agency offered by the systemic perspective and collaborative practices supported by social constructionism, as well as the implications of deficit language in the lives of children and their relational agents.
CLASS 2: Social Construction of Childhood
Teacher: Susana Sosenski
Class dynamics: Recorded
Throughout history, children have been defined by their age, physical characteristics, cognitive development, sexual inactivity, innocence, obedience, subordination, and dependence on the adult world. It is important to note that childhood is a socio-cultural construct that varies across time and space. We have constructed this notion based on certain commonplaces: age as a static and universal category; the polysemous nature of childhood; the perceived loss of childhood, which has led to the categorization of certain types of childhood; and the failure to understand that childhood is not a natural state for children, but rather an adult imposition. Even so, much remains to be done in childhood studies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
CLASS 3: The Care Society. Challenges and Policies
Teacher: Karina Batthyány
Dynamic: Recorded
This class will address some theoretical elements to problematize the concept of care and the challenges this topic poses for social organization and public policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. It will also analyze the relationship between care and social well-being. This analysis will be conducted from a gender and rights perspective.
CLASS 4: Childhood in times of pandemic and human rights: inequalities and violence towards children in situations of social vulnerability
Teacher: Alejandra Barcala
Dynamic: Synchronous
The overall objective of this class is to problematize the construct of children's human rights from ontological, epistemological, and praxeological perspectives, in order to promote meaningful learning that allows participants to reflect on, understand, and act upon this construct. International doctrine on children's human rights marks profound changes in the conceptualization of approaches to the field, establishing guidelines and standards to be met by countries that have signed international agreements. The new existing legal frameworks transform the way the State engages with children's issues and its capacity to regulate policies and social practices. Similarly, the relationships between the State, the market, and civil society necessarily change in light of these transformations; elements that have also been reconfigured during the pandemic. Within this framework, tensions are evident at the national level between the specific legislation that regulates the field and the management of implemented policies and institutional practices. Comprehensive rights protection initiatives coexist alongside regressive policies that undermine the recognition of the social rights of children and adolescents. The current reality in the countries of the region presents a landscape in which, far from the aforementioned standards, the number of children whose rights are violated is growing, especially those children who, due to various circumstances, are deprived of parental care and are institutionalized. In addressing the complexity of these problems, processes of medicalizing childhood suffering and paternalistic approaches are becoming entrenched.silares, which as government strategies regarding the most vulnerable children, tend towards social control and normalization.
CLASS 5: Normative framework of human rights
Teacher: Mariana Rey Galindo, accompanied by Alejandra Barcala
Dynamic: Recorded
The class focuses on guaranteeing the rights of children and adolescents. International human rights law clearly recognizes the special status of children and adolescents due to their development and growth. This recognition is accompanied by the establishment of a duty on the part of States to provide them with special and reinforced protection, from which the principle of the best interests of the child is derived. This principle obligates States to choose decisions and prioritize interventions that promote the realization of children's and adolescents' rights.
However, the mere legal recognition of the rights of children and adolescents is insufficient to guarantee their effective implementation and to transform the realities of this group of people. This course aims to promote among social science professionals the skills for an ethical and scientific approach to the issues that converge in the harmonious development of children and adolescents, based on intervention strategies aligned with current legal models for child protection.
CLASS 6: Poverty, inequality and public policies
Teacher: Alberto Minujín
Dynamic: Recorded
This class presents a set of elements that impact the equitable and holistic development of children. The class's conceptual framework combines a rights-based perspective, a well-being paradigm, and a social equity paradigm, forming an analytical framework that not only describes the current situation of children but also explores its causes and proposes solutions for its transformation.
This leads to considering the role of public policies, with an intersectional approach that emphasizes children in situations of greater social disadvantage, the attention of these policies at the local level as the concrete space where conditions of inequality can be addressed more directly, and the need to base policies and interventions on evidence that allows monitoring their evolution and systematically evaluating their relevance to contribute to the process of reducing inequalities in childhood.
CLASS 7: Political socialization and political subjectivity
Teacher: Sara Victoria Alvarado
Dynamic: Synchronous
Children's agency is a social construct situated within specific historical, sociocultural, economic, and political contexts. In Latin America and the Caribbean, these processes are highly precarious due to the configuration of territories hostile to life, where the guarantee of human rights remains unstable because of increased inequalities and structural violence produced by the neoliberal socioeconomic model. This includes forced displacement, internal and external migration caused by armed conflicts, impoverishment and unemployment, and a lack of educational opportunities and social mobility for large groups of people and families.
However, some of these inequalities and forms of violence have a greater impact on the lives of children, on the social and political construction of their collective identities and subjectivities, relationships, and practices. This is the case with gender-based violence against women, who, in a patriarchal society with a feminized care model, play a central role in the processes of raising, caring for, socializing, and educating children. Therefore, sexual violence as a weapon for controlling territories and dismantling collective capacities, street harassment, misogyny, machismo, sexism, and femicide have incalculable individual and collective psychological, emotional, relational, social, and political consequences for the present and future of children.
CLASS 8: Childhood in the context of migration, inequalities and conflicts
ProfessorIndira Granda
Dynamic: Recorded
We ask ourselves what the modes of relationship are for children today. Specifically, for those children who are part of a context of transnational human mobility in the Americas. Certainly, when we examine the markers of this context, we perceive that these modes of relationship are hostile to the experience of childhood, to the very experience of subjectivity and existence of the migrant child. Thus, the objective of this session will be to address this contextual study, according to: 1) the multiplicity and fluidity of human mobilities; 2) the historical character of the migratory phenomenon and the supranational territoriality that characterizes it; 3) current technologies for managing the lives of migrant populations, and 4) agency practices and becoming a child as an event, in their immediate relationship with mobility and difference (racial, cultural, linguistic).
For this purpose, findings from migration studies, childhood studies, and subjectivity studies are systematized and analyzed.
CLASS 9: Femicides, transvesticides and transfeminicides. Patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and racism.
Teacher: Karina Bidaseca
Dynamic: Recorded
Femicides, a term coined by feminist struggles to frame this phenomenon within the discourse of human rights, represent a profoundly obscene display of violence against our gender. They occupy one end of a continuum of gender-based violence perpetrated against women and feminine identities, a continuum that must be constantly redefined by patriarchy within a system of representations that orders, domesticates, and disciplines feminized bodies.
This class aims to address the true magnitude of the phenomenon by examining the approaches to femicide studies proposed by Diana Russell, Marcela Lagarde, and Rita Segato, situating the discussion within the interpretive framework we call decolonial, antiracist, and antispeciesist feminism, advocating for a politics of memory that is constantly being activated. It is impossible to understand the dehumanization of the human, mediated by the market logic under which I propose femicides be addressed, without framing it within the paradigm of modernity/coloniality. This necessitates analyzing colonial sexist imaginaries and their implications for the production of exclusionary binaries in our present-past. This includes what María Lugones defines as "sexual dimorphism" (Lugones, 2008), and what Rita Segato calls the "pornographic gaze" (Segato, 2014). We will situate the interpretation of gender and coloniality in Latin America and the Caribbean to approach a reflection on the plundering of bodies in the current capitalist, racist and patriarchal system.
CLASS 10: Citizenships
ProfessorDaniel Llanos Erazo
Dynamic: Synchronous
More than 30 years have passed since the signing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the structural conditions in Latin American and Caribbean countries have not significantly improved. Social policies remain ineffective and inefficient in responding to and addressing the needs of children. According to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2018), 617 million children and adolescents worldwide lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. In Latin America, 387 million school-aged children do not reach the minimum academic standards, according to the same institute.
This class aims to analyze the different We will examine the civic engagement of children in contexts where their rights are violated. Along these lines, we will explore the types of participation children have in different social spaces. Furthermore, in this class, we aim to analyze and compare the types of structural violence that affect the civic engagement of this population group.
CLASS 11: Children's culture and new forms of participation
Teacher: Marta Martinez
Dynamic: Recorded
Beyond the right to participation of children and adolescents, as a principle enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989), participatory processes have become a key strategy for children's exercise of citizenship. Thus, in the last three decades, the development of experiences in this area has gained considerable relevance, highlighting the diverse forms that participation can take and acquiring real political, social, and cultural significance in relation to the lives of children and society as a whole. This course will offer theoretical and practical tools for thinking about a new culture of childhood from a rights-based approach that fosters children's participation and empowerment.
CLASS 12: Childhoods in contexts of confinement. New realities, old problems?
Teacher: Karina Benavides
Dynamic: Recorded
In the context of lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new practices have emerged in all areas of society. According to data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this emergency has led to the widespread closure of in-person activities in educational institutions in more than 190 countries in order to prevent the spread of the virus and mitigate its impact. Preliminary data indicate that, as of June 2020, the student population affected by this measure in Latin America and the Caribbean exceeded 165 million children and adolescents.
For its part, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) states that even before facing the pandemic, the social situation in the region was deteriorating, due to the increase in poverty and extreme poverty rates, with significant negative effects on the various social sectors, including particularly health and education, as well as employment and the evolution of poverty (ECLAC, 2020a).
In this sense, problems of violence, overcrowding and health have led to educational scenarios with new problems; UNESCO has identified large gaps in educational outcomes, which are related to an unequal distribution of teachers in general, and of the best qualified teachers in particular, to the detriment of countries and regions with lower incomes and rural areas, which also tend to concentrate indigenous and migrant populations (UNESCO, 2016a; Messina and García, 2020).
CLASS 13: Early Childhood or how to begin. “Care and education” in the early years, a strategy against inequality.
Teacher: José Machain
Dynamic: Synchronous
The purpose of the class is to account for Early Childhood as a social category in itself, a historical-social construction with its specificities and particularities in the approaches, devices, programs and policies that allow children to be taken out of social invisibility to place them in the context of the construction of childhood citizenship and the right to equality.
CLASS 14: Childhoods and participatory practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Cuban experience of children's associations
Teacher: Keyla Rosa Estévez García
Dynamic: Recorded
In Latin America and the Caribbean, as in many parts of the world, children and young people face extremely difficult life situations marked by poverty and inequality within a context of economic and social policies that are only now beginning to listen to what these sectors have to say. This activity aims to understand how projects involving the participation of children and young people are integrated into the processes of citizenship and political cultures that characterize Latin America and the Caribbean.
Today, the participation of children is considered a desirable goal worldwide. It serves as an indicator of the extent to which children are taken into account and respected as subjects with their own rights and dignity, and of the level of influence they are allowed to have in their living environment, in society, and in international contexts when decisions are made and procedures are established that affect them. United Nations organizations, such as the International Children's Emergency Fund, and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are committed to promoting children's participation often base their work on the so-called participatory rights established by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Therefore, we will analyze aspects of these processes, particularly which activities of girls and boys are considered legitimate within different concepts of participation. We will study the concept of participation itself. The second part of this work specifically addresses children's participation and its relationship to different generational hierarchies. We will also discuss the various forms of participatory practice with and by children. Finally, we will examine the Cuban experience of children's participation.
CLASS 15: Education and internal armed conflict: Impact on the lives of Indigenous children in Peru
Teacher: Rossana Mendoza (Peru)
Dynamic: Recorded
The class focuses on the violence experienced by children during the Internal Armed Conflict (IAC) in Peru between 1980 and 2000. This conflict, centered in the southern and central regions of the country, affected the entire Peruvian population, with a disproportionate impact on Indigenous communities. This highlights the ongoing inequality and marginalization faced by Indigenous peoples. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report (2003) documented nearly 70,000 deaths and disappearances, 75% of whom spoke a language other than Spanish. Higher and secondary education institutions were centers for recruiting militants from armed parties, but also targets of attacks with the consequent militarization by the State, leaving a mark of fear, pain and violence in families and communities, whose memories remain silenced, making it difficult for the CAI to be addressed by educational programs and for Educational Institutions to be centers promoting peace and reconciliation.
| In one payment by 22/05 | In one payment after 22/05 | Payment in 3 installments | |
| CM Pleno | $175 | $230 | USD 315 (3 x USD 105) |
| CM Associate | $300 | $360 | USD 540 (3 x USD 180) |
| No link | $300 | $360 | USD 540 (3 x USD 180) |
To participate, you must register using the online form by clicking here. Registration will be open from March 6 to May 29, 2023.
Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.
Classes will begin in May and conclude in September 2023.
All registered participants will receive 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 to you.
Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases, and within the first month of the start of the Advanced Diploma program, students may request to withdraw from the cohort and rejoin the following year. In all cases, the reasons for the request must be submitted in writing. 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.
| In one payment by 22/05 | In one payment after 22/05 | Payment in 3 installments | |
| CM Pleno | $175 | $230 | USD 315 (3 x USD 105) |
| CM Associate | $300 | $360 | USD 540 (3 x USD 180) |
| No link | $300 | $360 | USD 540 (3 x USD 180) |
Payment can be made in one installment by credit card, bank deposit, 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.
Queries: WhatsApp:+54 9 11 3880 – 1388
E-mail: [email protected]
