France

This course covers the causes and international ramifications of the war in Syria, from the 2011 Arab Spring protests to the rise of ISIS, and from the interventions of Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia to those of the United States and its allies. After a brief introduction on the modern history of Syria and the geopolitics of the Levant, the course refocuses on policy analysis, with special attention devoted to understanding how the United States and its European allies initially responded to the crisis and how their policies evolved over the past seven years. The course thus considers conflict resolution and peace building in failed states, the risk of conflict spillover in neighboring countries, and the heightened risk of ISIS-inspired terrorism on a global scale. It also examines the Syrian refugee crisis and the catastrophic impact of the war on the political, economic, and social life of Syria and its people.

This course offers an approach to Francophone literatures. It presents the main aspects of literary Francophonie (linguistic, historical, political, sociological, aesthetics), based on the study of texts from various cultural areas.

This course provides a theoretical introduction to the economic issues related to the tasks of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank including a historical evolution and their current functioning. Topics covered include: free trade versus protectionism; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) from 1947-1995; the IMF's role in the Bretton Woods system; institutional issues and the functioning of the World Bank; World Bank policies and practices.

The focus of this course is to study how social reality exists. The starting point, which is generally agreed upon in philosophy, is that the structures that make up the social world—universities, governments, money, gender, for example—would not exist if human beings did not exist. Hence, it stands to reason that in one way or another we brought them into being; we constructed them, we made them. But this is where agreement ends. How we made them and what this means for how we study social phenomena—the aim of the social sciences—are hotly debated topics. This course discusses current debates in this field as well as other philosophical contributions closely related to this topic such as those made by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler. It introduces students to a foundational philosophical issue that can contribute to explaining why, within the social sciences, there is such a high level of disagreement. This should then serve to help students navigate the large quantity of different social sciences, schools of thought, and approaches they will be faced with during their studies.

This course examines the contemporary city, in its highly varied manifestations, in a broad historical and geographic context. It explores the economic, social, and political drivers of urban form, the technological and engineering aspects of urban infrastructure, and the cultural character brought to the cities through the design of their buildings and public spaces. It examines governance and political issues in this context with a specific view toward the formulation of public policy to address the critical challenges that cities face. This is not a broad survey course. Instead, the focus is on specific challenges faced by cities and specific times in history, when rapid development and changing circumstances converged to generate emblematic forms of urban life. Students see common themes emerge, providing them with tools and a framework that can be used to understand urban issues today. A first part of the class reviews case studies of four major cities at a critical juncture of their development. The objective of this section is to give students historical perspective on the dynamics that affect cities and on the recurrent themes in urban management. A second part of the class deals with contemporary cities and contemporary urban issues. The instructor reviews six areas that are driving changes in cities and presents the most advanced current thought in each of these, often drawing from real-life examples of work in which he is involved in a professional capacity. The objective of this course is to give students a better awareness of the city as an historical and cultural phenomenon and of cities as a place of development of policies that having increasing weight and reach. Students learn to better understand the strategic issues for the management of cities today and in the future. The course is appropriate for students who wish to broaden their understanding of cities as places of policy formulation and implementation or for those who may wish to consider careers related to the realm of urban affairs.

One of the founding fathers of legal anthropology, Karl Llewellyn described law as “a batch of tools to get jobs done in a culture,” and this course provides an opportunity to examine law from this perspective. Drawing on Llewellyn's anthropological approach to law, the first sessions ask: what jobs need to be done in a human group for it to become and therefore remain a society? How did the normative tools that are found in any human group transform historically to become Western law, then evolving into distinct civil law and common law traditions? Once students are provided with the foundational knowledge and methodology of legal anthropology, the remaining sessions are devoted to understanding what French and American laws reveal about the workings of their respective societies. Through adopting a chronological approach, the course covers major questions both societies face and how both legal systems address these concerns differently. Topics covered include: how power should be organized to avoid tyranny; how social instability resulting from industrialization and capitalism can be mitigated; how society responds to the tensions and challenges that arise from varying individual identities and technology.

This course presents the major movements, authors and works of sociology from the nineteenth century through the 1970s. It focuses on: the apparition and developments of sociology (cultural, political, economic); its theoretical and empirical orientations; the choice of fields and subjects studied in sociology (the main ones being on social issues and questions); debates, oppositions, and conflicts that animate the field of study.