France

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 focuses on the French art of strolling aimlessly through the city from the late 19th century to present. Exploring the intersection between the city walker and the urban environments navigated on foot, this course provides a unique perspective on the role of public space in the construction of urban modernity in France. The course adopts an explicitly class-, race-, and gender-critical approach to the study of this able-bodied practice that has traditionally been associated with a certain Baudelairean archetype of bourgeois masculinity. The course investigates who has the right to linger and be seen in public space, how the act of strolling aimlessly through the city intersects with other forms of societal privilege, and when and where wandering becomes a means of protest or resistance. By tracing the itineraries and embodied geographies that are traversed in this practice, this course creates a map of social mobility and urban modernity in the ever-evolving French city.

This course clarifies a number of key facts on the place and functions of the modern state in a selection of “advanced” or “developed” economies, mostly in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sample. It adopts an approach by main themes of government intervention. It also traces the successive developments of the modern state over the past 200 years in order to highlight the logic of today’s functions and actions and their determinants and objectives. The lectures, along with economic data, weave together major insights from political philosophy, history, and sociology.