National Autonomous University of Mexico

This course proposes a critical approach to the political geography of Mexico: a political, analytical and denouncing position, which understands that neither geography univocally conditions the political nor is the political foreign to spatialization. It provides theoretical and methodological tools to understand how power is exercised in and from space, and how that exercise has configured Mexican political geography in its historical, corporal and structural dimension. In this framework, the traditional categories of analysis - such as the State, territory, sovereignty or scale - are questioned from an analysis of power that allows to problematize its constitution, its contingency and its spatial production. This course invites one to think about the geographies of power in Mexico not as fixed and neutral expressions, but as fields crossed by violence, desire, inequality and resistance. The analysis starts from the spatial, products of power relations in constant (re)production, tense by daily struggles that seek to dispute the very meaning of what we call geography.

This course discusses the theoretical tools to understand the history of the processes of artistic development in Latin America, specifically during the 19th century.  The course integrates a concept of Latin American art based on a historical, aesthetic, and formal understanding of its transformations and offers students a set of resources for critically analyzing and evaluating contemporary Latin American art in accordance with regional development and the specific characteristics of each country.  It also reviews the necessary tools to learn how to view and analyze a work of art—whether painting, architecture, or sculpture—in terms of its formal qualities and to be able to describe it and formulate the most appropriate questions for a better understanding.

The course covers the following topics: the Age of Enlightenment and Neoclassicism; history of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in New Spain; the foundation of other art academies in Latin America; the origins of the French Artistic Mission in Paris and its arrival in Brazil in 1816; the independence movements and historical painting; traveling artists in the Americas: Alexander von Humboldt and Mauricio Rugendas, and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Europe and their repercussions in Latin America.

This course is a beginner level course taught in a bilingual environment of Spanish and Portuguese. The course covers basic vocabulary and grammar with the goal of building the capacity to talk about the learner´s daily activities and physical and psychological characteristics, while asking simple questions and conducting small conversations. The course also presents the general geography and cultural-historical information of Portuguese-speaking countries (Brasil, Portugal, Angola, etc.).

This course focuses on ancient Mexican art throughout Mesoamerica and its diverse regions.  In ancient Mexico, works of art played a particularly important role in the diverse rituals associated with the earth, the underworld, and death, but also with fertility and political power. By associating works of art with their archaeological context and original ritual function, the course introduces students to the wealth of information that the study of artistic works offers.
 

This course recognizes and valorizes the contributions of animals throughout history in the sum of responding to the epistemological question.  Can animals be individuals who enact their own intention and will who, through its own actions, create history with themselves as the protagonists? This course dives into socio-philosophical explorations of the parallel evolution of animal labor along with neoliberalism and capitalism while later linking its ties into the Latin American context.

This course explores different perspectives of contemporary democracy. The original investigations and categories of political science, those developed by Greek civilization, are proposed as a category of analysis. The course then reviews the construction of democracy; its corruption, and its demagogic implementation in contemporary regime. 

Indigenous peoples are present in the economic participation and cultural wealth of their nations.  A variety of languages can still be heard and seen, and uprisings, such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, can be observed.  This second semester course analyzes the cultural knowledge and original philosophies of each of the most important groups in Mexico: Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, and Quechua and Aymara of Peru and Bolivia, including a few other Mexican and Latin American philosophers.  

To understand the general orientation of the kind of thought known as German idealism, this course contextualizes Kant and the post-Kantian philosophers in Leibniz's project to: (1) Recover the Platonic tradition as an antidote to the nominalist theism of Locke and Berkeley; (2) Take as a formula the Kantian claim that his philosophy, transcendental philosophy, is idealist regarding the form of experience, but not its matter.  The full development of the meaning involved in this escape from (Berkeley's) material idealism leads the course gradually from the old Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment to the Nietzsche's declared death of criticism, allowing one to distinguish the unity of this important intellectual development.