French

This course addresses how history has been punctuated by civil resistance and disobedience movements whose characteristics, combats, tools, and arms get more sophisticated, shared, and reinvented as time moves forward. It identifies the news as a marker of movements of citizen protest, social opposition, demonstrations (such as Climate), and other acts of disobedience. From Thoreau to Gandhi, from Martin Luther King to the Extinction Rebellion movement, from Radio London (1940-1944) to the fight for the Larzac or the ZAD of Notre-Dames-des-Landes, this course explores how specific movements are born and fed and how media plays a role in the development or the resonance of these actions, from yesterday's press to modern platforms. The course includes analysis, readings, and deconstruction of what is called “civil disobedience and resistance,” in both democracies and authoritarian countries, from yesterday to today.

This course examines the role played by international law during European colonization and after the decolonization movement of the 1950s and 1960s (exploitation colonies) and the 1980s and 1990s (settlement colonies). The first part of the course shows how traditional international law was a colonialist and racist international law that legalized the entire colonial movement. The second part looks at the ambivalent role of contemporary international law: on the one hand, it is used to repair colonial history; on the other hand, it helps to perpetuate a regime of domination and contemporary neo-colonialism.

This course presents the main characteristics of the French school system, with a focus on elementary school. It includes a theoretical part and an application part, through the participation of students in an introduction to their native language and culture for elementary school pupils. The topics presented in the theoretical part include: organization of the French school system (in a comparative perspective); focus on a French characteristic: nursery school; inclusive education and the schooling of children with disabilities; the case of allophone pupils and openness to other languages at school. This course provides insights of the French school system and prepares exchange students to speak in front of primary school pupils as part of a multicultural team. Students reflect on aspects of their native culture and language that it would be relevant to share with the pupils.

The history of historians is part of a range of representations and appropriations of the past. It differs from them while echoing them. The scientific approach, based on a quest for truth and objectivity, using procedures and rules for the administration of evidence, coexists with a multitude of social and political relationships with the past, which have continued to multiply over the last forty years. Memorial claims, demands for reparations, ideological constructions, and the reinvention of traditions fuel numerous and contradictory discourses on the past, which take various forms (literature, cinema, visual arts, commemorations, collections, etc.). The past is a shared object, the uses of which are at the heart of political and social conflicts, particularly through the spread of the phenomenon of victim competition. The challenge of this course is to understand the logic and forms of these various uses, while defining the specificity of historical knowledge, its requirements, and its objectives. It also involves questioning its possible role in the current context marked by the resurgence of political nationalism, religious fanaticism, and attacks on democracy.

This course focuses on the history of the 1960s in America and connects it to global and American artistic reactions. It studies mediums such as sculpture, painting, text, and performance. The course explores David Hammons and the connection of his work to the history of the civil rights movement in America.