Advanced Diploma in Memory and Politics
1th Cohort | Virtual Modality
ACADEMIC COORDINATION
Yosahandi Navarrete Quan (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and María del Pilar López (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
PROFESSORS
Yosahandi Navarrete Quan (National Autonomous University of Mexico) | María del Pilar López (National Autonomous University of Mexico) | María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra (Alberto Hurtado University, Chile) | Amaral Arévalo (Postgraduate Program in Sociology and Law, Federal Fluminense University, Brazil) | Alba Patricia Hernández Soc (National Autonomous University of Mexico) | Mónica Toussaint Ribot (José María Luis Mora Research Institute, Mexico) | David Rocha (Central American University, El Salvador) | Mónica Albizúrez (University of Hamburg, Germany) | Leon Felipe Barron (Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico) | Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (University of Costa Rica)
Virtual format | August to November 2026
Home: 20/08/2026 | Registration: 15/05/2026 to 18/08/2026
This Diploma program seeks to approach, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the analysis of phenomena related to memory in Latin America—with an emphasis on Central America—and its recent study and discussion, based on the historical, cultural, and literary representations offered by the diverse narratives of Central and South America. From testimonial literature and postwar narratives to displacement writings, ecocriticism, and community memories, the program will explore how texts trace cartographies and itineraries.
symbolic of memory, trauma, identity, and resistance.In Latin America, collective memory has been a contested territory: a dynamic construct of remembrance, silence, forgetting, violence, trauma, and resistance. From testimonies of armed conflicts to writings of exile and migration, literature, history, cultural studies, and other disciplines have become privileged spaces for recording, reinterpreting, and reimagining the region's traumatic pasts and fragmented identities.
This diploma program proposes a critical and interdisciplinary exploration through what we call Itineraries of Memory in Latin America, and especially in Central America, a region where post-war processes, displacement and symbolic reconstruction have generated a literary corpus of great richness and complexity.
Through reading exercises, the study of representative literary works, and theoretical reflection, participants are invited to investigate and draw maps of memory that integrate politics, space, body, community, and the word as axes of reinterpretation of the recent past in Latin America.
The Higher Diploma emerged after the experience we had as coordinators of the two editions of the Higher Diploma: Central America through its literature of CLACSO, in 2024 and 2025. In it, the interest was shown in reviewing aspects (such as traumas, the manifestation of the politics of forgetting, the writing of silence, for example) that from aesthetics and narrative were presented as sensitive memories, difficult to address in social or political disciplines.
These Diploma programs focused on the study of aesthetic and literary representations from the last fifteen years in the Isthmus, their continuities and ruptures, transitions, and new proposals. However, the importance of studying and analyzing liminal or border texts—texts that represent and prefigure memories often impossible to write down or transmit except through experience or aesthetic representation—lies in understanding sociocultural phenomena within the context of armed conflicts and the transitions following their conclusion, as well as the implications these representations have in the present day, where disputes over memory and the experience of trauma remain. The challenge posed by the study of narrative in these regions extends to new epistemological definitions: it opens itself to currents of thought and disciplines that reclaim narrative as a fundamental element for understanding, deconstructing, and overcoming our present.
GENERAL PURPOSE
To analyze the ways in which the interplay between history, cultural studies, and Latin American literature, with an emphasis on Central American literature, constructs, represents, and reinterprets individual and collective memories, understood as symbolic itineraries that shape our understanding of territories, bodies, and subjectivities.
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
- Understanding the theoretical foundations on itineraries and cartographies of memories, imaginaries, spaces, traumas, silences and their representations.
- Recognizing the literary manifestations of memory in different historical and geographical contexts of Central America.
- Analyze testimonial, urban, migrant and gender-related written manifestations in their political and aesthetic dimension.
- To promote interdisciplinary reflection between literary aesthetics, history, art, and cultural studies.
- Prepare an essay or creative work that traces the paths of memory, whether social, personal, or collective.
The Higher Diploma in Memory and Politics 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.
The program consists of 5 modules of 3 weekly classes each, taught consecutively and linked together.
Total workload of 128 hours.
The modules that comprise the Higher Diploma are:
- Class 1: Memory as a field of study
Teacher: Pilar López Martínez
- To address in a general way the different current theories on memory and its representation in Latin American narrative.
- Class 2: Memories as a contested field: Memories/experiences/recollections. Cartographies of memory
Teacher: Yosahandi Navarrete Quan
- Studying the narrative representations of memories and their contrast with experience, in its collective and individual character.
- Class 3: Memory in Latin America, the case of Central America: Dictatorships, wars and post-conflicts as axes of study
Teacher: Mónica Toussaint
- Narratives about dictatorships, wars and post-conflicts in Central America will be reviewed, as a case study in Latin America, 20th century.
- Class 4: Testimony as a genre: From revolutionary testimony to postwar literature
Teacher: Pilar López Martínez
- Testimonial accounts of Central American armed conflicts and their aesthetic representation in the transition to post-war narratives will be analyzed.
- Class 5: Memory, violence, body and trauma
Teacher: Yosahandi Navarrete Quan
- The relationship between body, trauma, and narrative will be examined: corporeality seen as a memory archive of violence
- Class 6: The reconstruction of the past in contemporary narrative: Young authors and postmemory
Teacher: Mari Carmen Pérez Cuadra
- The new narratives and post-memory of armed conflicts will be reviewed, from the perspective of subjectivity and current aesthetic representations.
- Class 7: Topographies of forced displacement and exile: migration, diaspora and transnational memory
Teacher: Alba Patricia Hernández
- The representation and construction of memories in the forced mobilization due to exile and displacement will be analyzed in Latin American testimonies, narratives and poetics.
- Class 8: The Central American city as a palimpsest: San Salvador, Guatemala City, Managua
Teacher: Alexandra Ortiz Wallner
- The function of the city as a palimpsest of collective memory surrounding violence and armed conflicts will be reviewed, through the traces of memory that remain engraved in the urban space.
- Class 9: Writing as an itinerary: intimate maps, individual and collective transits, ruins and memory of space
Teacher: David Rocha
- Collective and individual memories will be analyzed based on the cartographies that memory constructs. Human migrations, their relationship with space, and their aesthetic representation will be examined.
- Class 10: Memory, violence and gender
Teachers: María del Pilar López Martínez and Yosahandi Navarrete Quan
- Gender-based violence is a structural process whose marks are inscribed on individual and collective memory, shaping identities, social relations, and historical narratives. This triad will be analyzed from an aesthetic perspective; how the patriarchal imaginary is perpetuated or transgressed in contemporary societies of the isthmus.
- Class 11: Dissident Bodies, Queer Memories
Teacher: Amaral Arévalo
- To analyze how the bodies that are prefigured in contemporary Central American narratives transgress the norms and become territories in which battles are fought for memory, truth and the right to desire.
- Class 12: The body as a territory of memory
Teacher: Mónica Albízures
- Review the ways in which various aesthetics (literary, visual, plastic) propose an integrated and material vision of memory based on bodily work in which the biographical and the historical are anchored.
- Class 13: Environmental memory: the territory as an archive
Teacher: Alba Patricia Hernández Soc
- Understanding the concept of environmental memory and the relationship between humankind and the land. An analysis will be conducted of how Central American literary and cultural narratives record, denounce, and process socio-environmental conflicts and the destruction of territories from late capitalism and its echoes to the present day.
- Class 14: Digital Archives, Memory and Posthumanism in Latin American Literature Teacher: León Felipe Barrón
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- To explore, through narrative, how digitization transforms the concepts of archive and memory, critically analyzing from a posthumanist perspective the implications on agency, materiality, ethics, and the constructions of subjectivities in contemporary culture.
- Class 15: Itineraries of the Future. Writing, Memory, and Community
Teacher: María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra
- Analyzing writing as a performative itinerary in which it is possible to find the traces for routes of hope, reparation and re-existence and how writing practices mobilize collective and community memories to project possible futures.
- Yosahandi Navarrete Quan (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
- María del Pilar López (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
- María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra (Alberto Hurtado University, Chile)
- Amaral Arévalo (Postgraduate Program in Sociology and Law, Federal Fluminense University, Brazil)
- Alba Patricia Hernández Soc (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
- Mónica Toussaint Ribot (José María Luis Mora Research Institute, Mexico)
- Leon Felipe Barron (Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico)
- David Rocha (Central American University, El Salvador)
- Monica Albizurez (University of Hamburg, Germany)
- Leon Felipe Barron (Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico)
- Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (University of Costa Rica)
| Early registration (until 07/07) | General registration (May 6th to May 12st) | Registration without discount (13/08 to 19/08) | Payment in 3 installments | |
| Full or Associate Member Center | $190 | $260 | $340 | USD 420 (3 x USD 140) |
| No Link | $340 | USD 410 | $460 | USD 630 (3 x USD 210) |
* Residents of Argentina will pay the equivalent in Argentine pesos according to the official exchange rate of the Banco de la Nación Argentina (BNA) on the day of payment.
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:
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.
Queries: WhatsApp: +54 9 11 3880 – 1388
E-mail: [email protected]
