French

This course addresses how immigration has been built into the political and social dimensions of France from a socio-historical perspective. The course traces the history of immigration in France beginning with the industrial revolution until today. The French and European institutional context, as well as geopolitical and ideological upheavals, are viewed as the driving forces that brought immigration to the political and societal forefront.

This course studies civil procedure. It focuses on the organization and functioning of civil justice, including the organization of the court and the trial system. Topics include how cases (mostly non-criminal) are brought before a judge, the criteria for gaining an audience with a judge, the roles of various members of the court, and the general rules for conducting court proceedings.

This course presents theories on the diversity of languages. Through a theoretical approach, it focuses on the relationship between language, culture, and geographical environment to study the representation of the world in relation to languages. The first part of the course deals with the categories of linguistic variation and the importance of translation and language learning. It presents characteristics common to languages or invariants, investigating the universals of language. The course then introduces the genetic classification of languages and revisits its history and related theories. It also discusses the typological classification and the areal method. The first part of the course serves as a theoretical foundation to lay the groundwork for the second part on sociolinguistic structures, which studies the contact of languages to explain the formation of mixed dialects.

This course examines narratives in French-speaking films. It looks at the historical context of the emergence and evolution of cinema in formerly colonized French-speaking countries, and explains how this context reveals postcolonial practices that question geopolitical dominations, new radicalisms, globalized cultures and local traditional constraints. It also looks at the institutional context and the aesthetics of French-speaking cinema, as well as its thematic convergences with French-speaking literature.

This course takes the form of a tour of the city and the environment near the Maison des Arts. Each session refers to two or three artists, photographers, or painters. Students learn to handle the device, exercise the gaze, and situate their work in relation to old or current references. This course alternates short exercises with visits to exhibitions and artistic places and meetings with actors of contemporary art. Topics such as device, document and fiction, photography and identity, and certain salient elements of the history of photography are discussed. Students design, produce, and present a photographic project that demonstrates a unique approach to the subject and a required minimum mastery of the photographic tool, and reflects on the place of the optical image in the field of art not as a goal to be achieved but as an exchangeable form open to the subjectivity of the spectators.