Undergraduate Diploma in Cartographic Practices in Latin America

Created by Resolution C.S. No. 046/2022, dated March 03, 2022.

Academic Coordinators: Carlos Salamanca and Carlos Duarte

:: RATIONALE: The Undergraduate Diploma in Cartographic Practices in Latin America is an undergraduate studies certification that aims to produce, develop and transmit knowledge about cartographic thought and practice as a set of tools for social and political analysis and transformation oriented to make visible, problematize, question and offer solutions to different types of events or situations of environmental or socio-spatial injustice.

In its teaching, forms of internal organization, access criteria, advice, monitoring and forms of evaluation for students, as well as in its inter-institutional alliances, the Diploma is based on and promotes the principles of consensus, plurality, diversity, respect and promotion of human rights, and is committed to the need to design and implement mechanisms of social and political transformation based on those same values. Along these lines, it has clear and transparent mechanisms to guarantee the access and participation of members of the vulnerable population and guides all of its activities to achieve concrete advances in environmental and socio-spatial justice.

:: DURATION AND MODALITY:

The Diploma program will last 7 months, with a break between August 4th and 18th, 2026. Classes are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 17:00 PM to 19:00 PM (Colombia time) and from 19:00 PM to 21:00 PM (Argentina time). It is offered online through the UNR Virtual Campus. All synchronous classes will be recorded and available from the beginning to the end of each semester.

The distance pedagogical model is made up of four elements:

(1) A tutoring system, defined at the beginning of the diploma based on the thematic interests of the participants in units coordinated by the specialist teachers of each module throughout the Diploma.

(2) A series of three brief practical works prepared individually that allow monitoring of the acquisition of the tools at three stages of progress.

(3) A Final Integrative Evaluation defined jointly with the specialist teachers/tutors.

(4) A toolbox accessible for consultation in folders organized by each thematic module where all the materials (academic articles, maps, experiences, etc.) that are addressed throughout the Diploma will be found.

:: GRADUATE PROFILE: Upon completion of the Diploma program, students will possess methodological, theoretical, and practical tools to critically engage with maps. This includes understanding maps as a representational device as well as the practical and political dimensions of their creation. Graduates will also have an up-to-date overview of cartographic practices in Latin America, their most important antecedents, and their future directions.

:: ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS : The Diploma program has the following admission requirements:

- Being over 18 years

-Have a secondary degree. Exceptionally, those people over 25 years of age who have not completed their secondary studies and work in activities, organizations or other agencies linked to the subject of the diploma will be admitted.

For registration, students must present:

– Complete registration form (SIU Guarani).

– Certified copy of university, tertiary, secondary degree title as appropriate.

– Certified copy of the DNI or passport and copy of the birth certificate.

Non-Spanish-speaking applicants must accredit the independent intermediate level (B2) or higher of knowledge of the Spanish language in order to register for the Diploma, according to the standards established by the MECRL (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

:: PROGRAM: 

This diploma is structured as follows: 

• Two (2) thematic areas with four (4) modules each.
• Two (2) integration activities
• Three (3) tutorials
• Final Integrative Evaluation. 

The first area, called Conceptual Problems, includes the following modules: Introductory Notions, Socially Engaged Cartography, Cartographies and Mobilities, and Cartography of Memory. The second area, called Subjects and Territories of Practices, unfolds in the following modules: Popular Neighborhoods, Feminist Cartographies, Territories and Identities, and Political Ecology and Environmental Justice. In teaching these modules, the Diploma program proposes a series of questions that are presented as paired concepts and that will be addressed in each session, encouraging reflection and practices related to space and territory and their representations: (a) Visibility/Invisibility (b) Spatial Justice and Injustice (c) Scales and Jurisdictions (d) Synchrony and Diachrony (e) Ethical Dimension of Maps and Mapping Practices.

In order to make the specificity of the thematic modules more complex, two Integration Activities are proposed throughout the Diploma. Finally, there are three Tutorial spaces.

It is noteworthy that all modules are coordinated by specialists in their fields and different thematic objectives are proposed through specific devices and varied pedagogies that include readings of academic articles, critical discussion of mapping processes, dialogues with international guests, workshops and activities. practices and experimentation. At the end, students will have an updated and broad overview of the main axes in which cartographic practices are developed in Argentina and Latin America and with critical tools to approach them.

Minimum module contents:

1. Introductory Notions

SESSION 1. General introduction

– Cartographies for territories in emergency. Who maps? What is mapped? Scales and problems: continuities and adjustments.

SESSION 2. Historical-political background of social cartography

– Medieval maps, performative nature-culture assemblages. Imperial maps: the production of socio-territorial differences. The map, the nation, the museum: myths of a national community. Counter-cartographies.

SESSION 3. The construction of cartographic data

– Reverses and obverses, the map in its structure. Database and geolocation. Collaborative, participatory, network work. Possible dialogues between different types of sources (official and unofficial).

SESSION 4. The exponential growth of ICTs and the consequences of a cartographic “revolution”

– FOLLOW everyone! paradoxes of the universalization of cartographic representation. From paper to googlemaps: possible dialogues? Collaborative platforms, new technologies

2. Involved Social Cartography

SESSION 1. Introductory fundamentals

– Fundamentals of Social Cartography and collective mapping, theoretical approaches, history and trends in Latin America. Cartographic Research, territory, drifts and multiplicity. Introduction to Social Cartography. 

SESSION 2. Devices and tools

– Cartographic production device. From target to mapping device. Objective translations – emerging paths and multitextualities. Generation of routes, mapping and systematization

SESSION 3. Social Cartography as an experiential revealer of inhabited space

– Social Cartography and production of space in terms of spatial trialectics. Space, common goods and habitat in urban and rural contexts. The appropriation of space and social mapping as a catalyst process for territorial disputes and asymmetries. 

SESSION 4. Experiences and journeys

– Practices and methodological production in the university career. Resistance mappings

– Youth and locality, cartography as a meeting project

3. Popular Neighborhoods

SESSION 1. Understanding the popular habitat

– Introduction: from the right to housing to the right to the city. Social production of habitat and urban informality. Popular neighborhoods: violations of rights and collective powers.

SESSION 2. Rights and meanings of cartography in popular neighborhoods

– Official cartography, speeches and public policies in towns and settlements. Rights and regimes of visibility/invisibility. The right to habitat and the symbolic recognition of popular neighborhoods.

SESSION 3. Social cartography as a tool for dispute

– From emptiness to plot: disputes over visibility in official cartography. From popular mapping to official cartography: powers and tensions. Powers of social cartography for participation in urban policies.

SESSION 4. Mapping methodologies in towns and popular neighborhoods

– Intersectoral articulation for the implementation of mapping projects in towns and settlements. Participatory methodologies for mapping popular towns and neighborhoods. Appropriation, uses and debates about maps in popular neighborhoods.

6. Cartography of memory

SESSION 1: Space and Memory

– Conceptual approaches What and how does space narrate? The cartography of memory as a record. Interaction with other file types. Ways of approaching the cartography of memory in Argentina.

SESSION 2: First approaches to memory cartography

– Background of memory cartography in Argentina. Maps as educational and cultural tools. Room of CCD / LTD cartographic approaches and models in the Museum of Memory.

SESSION 3: The cartography of terror, reconstruction of circuits and repressive trajectories

– Audiovisual Judicial Records, Audiovisual Representations of the Territory (RAT). and Comprehensive Architectural Registries (RAI).

SESSION 4: Spatiality and memory in Latin America

– Actions to fight for the institution of spaces/initiatives. Political and legal approaches. Uses of spaces. Survey of experiences. Urban and rural spaces

7. Territories and identities

SESSION 1. Visibility and invisibility regimes and the right to exist

– State practices of socio-spatial alterity in colonial cartography. Colonial and state cartographies as tools of visibility of certain “populations” and “accepted” territorial practices. Inscription of emerging geographies and sociability in colonial cartography.

SESSION 2. Policies and rights in plural geographies

– Territorial practices and representation: the performative condition of maps in the field of rights. Limits of “classical” cartography in the representation of other territorial practices. Maps for decentred ethnic citizenships: ethnicity at the margins.

SESSION 3. Violence(s) and memory

– Cartographic representations of state devices of violence: criticism and representation. Maps to problematize in a plural way the demands of “Memory, Truth and Justice”. Territorial reviews of violence: for a procedural and territorial view of violence.

SESSION 4. Cartographies of the common

– The map and the ontological turn. Mapping the Anthropocene: representing destruction to imagine other possible worlds. Maps of extractivism versus the geographies of the common

10. Cartographies and Mobilities

SESSION 1. Cartographies

– From the monopoly of production to criticism and the insurrection of knowledge. The critical practices of mapping: social and artistic experimentation. Geographic information systems and the opening of the mapping code.

SESSION 2. Mobilities

– From the spatial turn to the mobility turn. Mobility and immobility as devices of power. Differences between acceleration and transformation.

SESSION 3. Mappings

– The map as an artifact of power and territorialization. Participation and mapping tools. The map as a territorial planning device.

SESSION 4. Territoriality and flow agents

– Hydrosocial territories. Common territories, forms of organization, access and reproduction, assemblages of human and non-human actants. 

11. Feminist Cartographies

SESSION 1. Key concepts for a feminist view of the territory and its cartographies

– Patriarchy, gender, sex and identity. Intersectionality and transversality of perspective. The patriarchal-neoliberal system, its power relations, (re)production of spaces and territorial inscription. The power of social cartography and feminism to think and transform with practice from different areas.

SESSION 2. Bodies and territory: hierarchies, power and spatialities

– Feminist approaches to the relationship between body and territory. The body as territory or “body-territory” as a political category. Minorized groups, invisible, stigmatized and outcast subjects and their territorial footprint.

SESSION 3. Cartographies of gender violence

– Gender violence and territorial configuration. Fear, discipline and (re)production of patriarchal power relations and certain unjust territories. Cartography as a device for denunciation and resistance, for collective action and for the construction of critical readings of the territory.

SESSION 4. Feminist city and cartographic representations

– Right to the city and feminism. Neoliberal configuration of cities, segregation, fragmentation, gentrification, housing deficit, etc. in a feminist key. Disputes, conflicts and appropriations of public space. Cartographies of urban phenomena and other narratives of the city from feminism and transfeminism.

12. Political Ecology and Environmental Justice

SESSION 1. Introduction to political ecology and environmental justice.

– Political ecology and environmental justice, genealogies, derivations and synthesis. Social metabolism, capital/nature dialectic, (in)justice, knowledge and power. Methodological challenges in contexts of stressed fields.

SESSION 2: Extractivisms, territories and socio-environmental health.

– Conceptual approaches. Extractivisms and their impacts on the Health of territories and communities and subjects. Body-Territory Relationship. University and construction of knowledge for what? for whom? With whom?

SESSION 3: Cartographies of accumulation through dispossession

– Political economy and political ecology of property. The multiple forms of capitalist accumulation processes in space, expanded speculation. Expansion of the extractive frontier and sociopolitical dynamics of contestation.

SESSION 4: Socionatural disasters. Spatial risks and injustices in the Capotalocene

– Anthropocene, Capitalocene and global reproduction of climate risks. Knowledge, knowledge, agencies and interests at stake under the framework of the risk cycle of contemporary environmental and climate disasters. Social perspective and methodological challenges in studies of political ecology and socio-natural risks.

4 and 8. Integrative Activities

The Integrative Activities aim to link the content taught in the modules that precede the dictation of each of these spaces in order to establish articulations between both thematic fields of inquiry. It will be carried out through the resolution of case studies that simultaneously question the issues involved. The teachers in charge of these curricular activities will be the instructors of the modules involved.

5, 9 and 13. Tutorials

To prepare the Final Integrative Evaluation, each student must choose a thematic line from those addressed during the Diploma course. In this sense, the tutorials are presented as individual monitoring schemes for each of the students based on the eight thematic lines offered by the Diploma. The choice is free, however, an equitable distribution will be attempted between the number of students and the number of thematic lines addressed. The person responsible for each module is the one who will coordinate the tutoring of the thematic line it represents. This is how each student, throughout the course of the Diploma, will carry out work guided by the tutor who will be aimed at identifying, developing and defining their final work.

CODE	MODULE	THEORETICAL HOURLY LOAD	PRACTICAL HOURS LOAD	TOTAL HOURLY LOAD	CORRELATIVITIES
1	Introductory Notions	8h	8h	16 hrs
2	Involved Social Cartography	8h	8h	16 hrs
3	Popular neighbourhoods	8h	8h	16 hrs
4	Integrative Activity I	2h	2h	4 h
5	Tutoring I	1h	1h	2h
6	Cartography of Memory	8h	8h	16 hrs
7	Territories and Identities	8h	8h	16 hrs
8	Integrative Activity II	2h	2h	4 h	4
9	Tutoring II	1h	1h	2h	5
10	Cartographies and Mobilities	8h	8h	16 hrs
11	Feminist cartographies	8h	8h	16 hrs
12	Political ecology and environmental justice	8h	8h	16 hrs
13	Tutoring III	1h	1h	2h	9
14	Integrative Final Evaluation				1 to 13
TOTAL		71 hrs	71 hrs	142 hrs

Synchronous hours: 70%

Asynchronous hours: 30%

Modality of subject practices

They will be carried out on theoretical-practical models proposed by the teachers or, as a priority, on analysis models proposed by the students that will include:

•    Presentation of databases that address real application cases, on which students will carry out various cartographic analyses.
• Use of specific software (Microsoft Excel templates, etc.) and open access collaborative mapping platforms (Open Street View). In the event that they have problems accessing online work tools or equipment, with the advice and support of tutors, students will be able to develop their work on paper and send both the progress and the final work via email or WA.

Final evaluation mode

To pass the Diploma, students must:

to. Complete two practical assignments of approximately 500 words. each one that will be delivered at the end of Integrative Activities I and II. Delivery will be made through the UNR Virtual Campus.

b. Carry out an Integrative Final Evaluation, written and individual, in the format of an academic article (approximately 5000 words) with a theoretical and/or methodological problematization. The delivery date of the evaluation will take place within 6 (six) months of the end of the course.

* To maintain the regularity of the seminar, 80% of the synchronous and asynchronous activities must be completed and participate in the forums.

:: REPORTS:

cartografiaslatinoamericanas@gmail.com

Website: https://www.javerianacali.edu.co/intercultural/practicas-cartograficas-en-america-latina

Attached files:

Diplo_Cartographic_Practices

UNR-PUJC Agreement

CONV_3804-2022-JAVERIANA

Brochure_Diploma_2026