Advanced Diploma in Historical Reparation and Afro-Diasporic Perspectives in the Digital Age

Class 1: Introduction to the Higher Diploma: “Historical Reparation and Afro-Diasporic Perspectives in the Digital Age”

Teachers in charge: Rosa Campoalegre Septien and Anny Ocoro.

Conceptual summary of the class:

This class offers a comprehensive overview of the academic program. It includes a dialogic presentation of the objectives, the program's structure highlighting its core themes, the teaching staff, and the student body. It outlines the organizational structure and dynamics of the Diploma program, as well as the final assessment. Finally, it characterizes the context in which this Advanced Diploma program is being offered, 25 years after the Durban Declaration and Transcendental Disasters and during the Second International Decade for People of African Descent.

Class 2: Historical Reparation as a Paradigm in Construction

Teacher in charge: Rosa Campoalegre Septien

Conceptual summary of the class:

This class analyzes the Historical Reparations of Afro-descendant and African peoples and how to understand them within the context of the current global polycrisis, in accordance with the legacy of the Durban Conference. Based on an assessment of its historical antecedents and the demands driven by the Afro movement, the class examines the foundations, principles, and dimensions of Historical Reparations, emphasizing its character as a comprehensive, intersectional, and emancipatory process, a paradigm under construction, and the epicenter of the anti-racist agenda. The class also reflects on the experiences, progress, and challenges faced by Historical Reparations processes in different contexts, highlighting the leading role of these Afro-descendant and African peoples in the construction of this emerging paradigm.

 

Class 3: Systemic and structural racism. Its reconfiguration today

Teacher in charge: Rosa Campoalegre Septien

Conceptual summary of the class:

This class presents the genealogies of racism, exploring the interrelationship between colonialism, coloniality, decoloniality, and racism. Based on this, it assesses the continued relevance of the position taken by the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2001), as well as the recognition of slavery as the most serious crime against humanity in history.

It also addresses racism as a polysemous and open category, examining the typologies of racism, its manifestations, and its connections to other systems of oppression, highlighting the methodological and political importance of differentiating between them, as well as the main consequences it produces in social life. Finally, it reflects on contemporary reconfigurations of racism, its current trends and challenges, emphasizing the need to de/construct the anti-racist agenda in the face of the reconfiguration of structural and systemic racism.

Class 4: Afro-descendant Peoples and Afro-descendant International Law

Teacher in charge: Jhon Antón García

Conceptual summary of the class:

This course addresses the emergence and development of the category of “Afro-descendant peoples,” analyzing the historical, political, and legal contexts that have contributed to its legitimization at the regional and international levels. It will examine the debates surrounding the notions of Afro-descendant peoples, communities, and individuals, their main references, and their implications for collective rights. Furthermore, it will analyze the main national and international forums for debate on this category, including the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, the Afro-descendant movement, national and international legal instruments on the subject, and the draft Declaration on the Rights of People of African Descent. International Law on Afro-descendants: Content and Challenges

Class 5: The generations of rights of Afro-descendant peoples and their current situation in digital capitalism

Teacher in charge: Pastor Elias Murillo

Conceptual summary of the class

The anti-racist struggle, as a complex process, reveals diverse generations that mark progress, shortcomings, and future prospects in the recognition, legal protection, guarantee, and promotion of these rights. This class comparatively analyzes these generations, placing them within their respective contexts and defining their purpose up to the present day.

In this regard, the class pays particular attention to the fact that, for the first time in history, the drafting and promulgation of an International Declaration for the promotion, guarantee, and full respect of the rights of people, communities, and peoples of African descent is being considered, underscoring the role of the Afro movement in this context. It analyzes which rights are currently under pressure, taking a proactive approach that assesses the progress, risks, and possibilities for the proclamation of the Declaration in question, as a legal instrument for the international community to combat racism in the face of the challenges of the digital age.

 

Class 6: Afro-descendant rights in tension: progress and challenges in their implementation

Teachers in charge: Felicitas Regla López Sotolongo

Conceptual summary of the class

This course examines the legal framework for the rights of Afro-descendant peoples, considering the main legal instruments and regulations at the national, regional, and international levels that promote these rights. It also explores the tension between the regulation of these rights and their practical implementation, as well as the erosion of the very notion of human rights in the context of the global polycrisis. This presents a historical challenge to guarantee full citizenship in the face of structural and systemic racism.

Class 7: Afro-reparations and epistemic justice in education

Teacher in charge: Anny Ocoró Loango

Currently, Afro-descendant populations continue to face significant obstacles to accessing, remaining in, and graduating from the various levels of the education system, as well as profound structural inequalities that shape their educational trajectories. Given this context, this class aims to reflect on historical reparations in the educational and epistemic fields, analyzing their implications for the recognition and valorization of Afro-diasporic epistemologies, and for problematizing and overcoming what Fricker (2017) calls epistemic injustice. Within this framework, the role of symbolic and material reparations will be discussed as part of an agenda committed to racial justice, the democratization, and decolonization of education systems.

 

Class 8: Political Cartographies and Contemporary Theoretical Debates on the Curriculum with an Intersectional Perspective

This course introduces students to the main contemporary theoretical debates surrounding educational inequalities, from an intersectional perspective of race, gender, and social class, with the aim of reflecting on the challenges posed by an anti-racist, egalitarian, and intercultural education. This approach will allow students to broaden their understanding of educational inequalities and enrich their training through an intersectional analysis and an examination of cultural diversity in the field of education.

Class 9: Afro-diasporic education: contributions to global racial justice

Teacher in charge: Jorge Enrique García Rincón

This course analyzes the inequalities in access to technology that affect the territories of the African diaspora, as well as the biases present in the images and representations of these populations generated by artificial intelligence. It also reflects on the potential of Afro-diasporic education to transform racial power relations, based on a political conception and practice of technology that recovers the contributions of Black and African peoples to the production of knowledge. Finally, it problematizes the forms of dehumanization inherent in necrotechnology (García, 2025), while advancing proposals and alternatives for a technological transformation committed to racial justice, equality, and the full recognition of the humanity of Afro-diasporic peoples.

Class 10: Data Colonialism and Algorithmic Racism

Teacher in charge: Nathalie Cook

This course examines the contemporary dynamics of data colonialism and its implications for the reproduction of racial inequalities in digital environments. From a critical perspective on technology, it will analyze how the extraction, classification, processing, and massive use of data can reproduce historical relations of power, exclusion, and subordination that disproportionately affect people of African descent and other historically marginalized groups. It will also explore the mechanisms by which algorithmic systems can generate, amplify, or perpetuate racial biases in areas such as security, employment, education, health, political participation, and access to services. The course will address key concepts such as algorithmic discrimination, data governance, automated bias, digital surveillance, and human rights in the age of artificial intelligence, providing tools to understand the ethical, legal, and political challenges associated with these technologies.

 

Class 11: Ethnocoding and algorithmic racial justice: towards an Afro-descendant architecture of technological governance

 

Teacher in charge: Nathalie Cook

This course presents ethnocoding as a technical, political, and epistemological approach aimed at building more equitable, culturally relevant, and respectful technological systems that acknowledge human diversity. From an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates information technology law, technology governance, critical technology theory, and artificial intelligence, the course will analyze how digital rights, the regulation of algorithmic systems, and the design of technological infrastructures require incorporating the knowledge, identities, experiences, and aspirations of historically excluded communities. Finally, it will reflect on the role of algorithmic racial justice as a fundamental component for building more inclusive, democratic, and socially responsible digital ecosystems.

Class 12: Generative AI as a revenge against the epistemology of ignorance

Teacher in charge: Tracizio Silva

This class will analyze the current offensive by large technology companies and financial capital to promote and normalize so-called generative AI as an inevitable and indispensable technology, as well as its relationship to the dynamics of racial capitalism. It will examine the repeated manifestations of algorithmic racism identified by researchers and journalists from around the world, drawing on the theoretical contributions of authors such as Charles Mills, Sueli Carneiro, and Syed Mustafa Ali.

Among the topics to be addressed are: epistemicide, its history and its transformations in the digital age; connectionist artificial intelligence and its technopolitical challenges; the damages, risks and forms of racial discrimination associated with algorithmic systems; and the processes of algorithmization, platformization and generative artificial intelligence in their relation to the reproduction of racism.

Class 13: Ecogenoethnocide and historical justice

Conceptual summary of the class

Teacher in charge: Santiago Arboleda Quiñones

This class argues for the need to holistically understand ecocide, genocide, and ethnocide as a necrophilic colonial and neocolonial pattern. It analyzes the relevance of concepts within the notion of ecogenoethnocide in order to move beyond the descriptive and interpretive fragmentation that has prevailed to date.

The class proposes a conceptual framework that seeks to address the ongoing tension between sociohistorical and legal truth, present in these types of phenomena subject to interpretive disputes, advocating for critical, biocentric, and decolonizing social, human, and intercultural sciences. The behavior of this problem in the region is examined, focusing on the case of the armed conflict in Colombia.

Class 14: Environmental Racism: Afro-feminist alternatives for the future

Teachers in charge: Karina Bidaseca

Conceptual summary of the class

The topic delves into environmental racism, its causes, and trends. Based on this, it emphasizes three interconnected lines of analysis: First, the category of “Ancestral Future” (Krenak, 2020), which expresses the synergy between the knowledge of historically racialized peoples. Second, the experience of Afro-descendant communities facing ecological losses in their territories; and third, the artivism of Afro-American and African women in the struggle against this type of racism, from an Afrofuturist perspective.

Class 15: Systematizing dialogues for the closing of the Higher Diploma

Teachers in charge: Rosa Campoalegre Septien, Anny Ocoró Loango

Conceptual summary of the class

The class offers a collective space for systematizing the learning, reflections, and debates developed throughout the Diploma program. Based on a review of the initial expectations for the program and a critical evaluation of the content covered, participants reflect on the challenges of the anti-racist agenda, focusing on historical reparations and social transformation in the region. They also identify emerging themes for future editions and provide methodological and organizational guidelines for preparing the final projects.