Advanced Diploma in Youth: Inequalities, Cultures and Policies

The persistent structural inequality in the various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean has not been reversed, despite some progress, and neoconservative policies that reinstate discourses related to equality of opportunity and progress as individual responsibility are reinforced.

This creates and reconfigures circles of inequalities that generate violence and social and symbolic fragmentation that limit the capacity for recognition and participation of various sectors, particularly youth and their experiences not only due to socioeconomic factors, but also due to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, territorial location, migrant status, disability, among others.

The vast majority of young people find themselves immersed in asymmetrical relational dynamics where they are treated as passive objects to be controlled and molded according to the needs and parameters of the frameworks recognized and dictated by the market. Public policies fail to transcend these frameworks; and in some countries, the dismantling of previously achieved affirmative and inclusive policies can be observed.

These socializing dynamics tend to increase generational gaps, which are becoming increasingly profound at the political and communicative level, between the past, present and future, breaking with the shared expectations of building horizons of possibility different from inherited violence and exclusion.

Despite the complexity of the current context, it is also recognized that, in Latin America and the Caribbean, different forms of social interaction and action have been emerging among young people, not only as a defiant response to the adult-centric world, but also as an expression of participation and collective organization that demonstrates their positioning as political subjects in different territories. The social struggles (environmental, gender, anti-military, artistic, and countercultural, among others) in which young people participate reveal trends that reflect conflicts within a specific national or local context, but also shared causes and common demands that transcend national and regional boundaries, sometimes linked to international patterns. These demands require analytical approaches capable of producing situated explanations that help overcome conditions and situations of injustice and inequality.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its effects not only on health but also on the economic, educational, labor, and social spheres in general, has created a scenario in which existing gaps have been reinforced with very particular impacts on young people, while demanding a new repertoire of social relationships to confront them.

All of the above requires addressing the issues from epistemic, theoretical and methodological frameworks that recognize the historical, intersubjective, heterogeneous, generative and complex condition of youth; and that allow proposing transdisciplinary, transsectoral and interregional actions that recognize and guarantee the participation of youth as active agents.

GENERAL PURPOSE:

To bring students closer from a theoretical-critical perspective to the knowledge of the youth condition in Latin America and the Caribbean, to work experiences, social organizations, public policies and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the life worlds of young people.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

1. Understanding the situation of youth in Latin America and the Caribbean from theoretical perspectives that respond to critical epistemologies and the frameworks of reality in which their meanings of existence are disputed.
2. To socialize theoretical-conceptual approaches for the analysis of inequalities and violence in youth from a generational perspective and their manifestation in institutional spaces.
3. To contribute to the construction of a critical perspective of hegemonic and media narratives about youth from an epistemological view of decolonization and the recognition of youth practices, voices and experiences.
4. To contribute to the understanding and approach to the transformations in the forms of participation, activism, collective action and aesthetic, cultural and communicative production of young people from a social and historical perspective.
5. To encourage reflection on the role of the State and the implementation of public policies and to strengthen the link between knowledge and politics in the field of youth.

The Higher Diploma in Youth: Inequalities, Cultures and Policies 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.

• Melina Vázquez (IIGG-CONICET, Argentina)
• Silvia HS Borelli (PUCSP, Brazil)
• Pablo Vommaro (CLACSO – CONICET, Argentina)
• María Isabel Domínguez (CIPS, Cuba)
• Mariana Chaves (CONICET – UNLP, Argentina)
• Sara Victoria Alvarado (CINDE/UMANIZALES, Colombia)
• Juan Romero (UDELAR, Uruguay)
• Liliana Mayer (CONICET, Argentina)
• Rose de Melo Rocha (PUCSP, Brazil)
• José Manuel Valenzuela (Colmex, Mexico)
• Maria Claudia S. Paiva (PUC-SP, Brazil)
• Olivia Cristina Perez (UFPI, Brazil)
• José Antonio Pérez Islas (SIJ-UNAM)
• Rene Unda Lara (CINAJ, Ecuador)
• Diego Beretta (UNR, Argentina)

The program consists of 5 modules of 5 weekly classes each, each taught consecutively and linked to the others.

Total workload of 128 hours.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are: