France

This course investigates how states and international actors have responded to new security challenges in response to the speed and scale of climate change, and how their different understandings of the climate-security nexus might shape global responses to climate change. It relies on an innovative theoretical approach spanning traditional security, human security, and existential security that helps to capture the complex dynamics of emerging approaches to dealing with security in the Anthropocene. By comparing how different framings of climate security impact various policy sectors, the course assesses the barriers and opportunities for addressing global climate security.

This course involves building a project using complex installation devices that fundamentally question plasticity, setting and space, and the place of the spectator in relation to the production. Students respond to a subject, incentive, problem, or theme through increasingly personal mediums, postures, gestures, and tools to situate this realization in the field of contemporary creation.

This course has two parts. The first part surveys some of the main stages in the evolution of the American horror film. Starting from its literary influences, it then focuses on its growth and relationship with the then budding television in the 1950s. It analyzes the role of the TV news and the Hays code in the 1960s. And, as it reaches the heydays of horror films in the 1970s (with the involvement of the New Hollywood in the field of horror), it eventually observes how the conventions of the genre have successfully spread into some of the best TV series at the turn of the century. The course provides a mix of theory and practice with the analysis of some scenes, echoing what will have been shown in the first part of the class. The study of these excerpts develop the ability to express skills for commenting on cinematographic works of art and provides an opportunity to write a short file on a film or a TV series. The second part of the course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of comics as a medium based on “sequential” images, to be distinguished from photography’s still images and film’s moving images. It is based on the analysis of various samples of primarily American comics by means of the interpretive grids presented by Scott McCloud’s UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART (1993), an introductive study of the comics medium presented as a book-length comic. 

This course provides a political analysis of the way in which citizens construct their voting choice, the game of political forces, their evolution, their reassembly, and the impact of institutions on the political system. The class touches on disciplines such as political science, law, history, and sociology to contextualize the political events that shake up and shook up political life under the fifth republic.

This transdisciplinary course covers utopian and dystopian visions in literature, painting, film, television, and political discourse, both past and present. It successively covers the main themes and concerns of various schools of utopia (alotopias, primitivism, Robinsonades, blueprint utopias, etc.) and dystopia (far-right and far-left politics, populism and demagoguery, fear of new technologies, fear of government censorship, dark anti-feminist visions of the future, fear of the growing need for conformity and political correctness, fear of growing crime and violence, etc.). The course broadens the vision of dystopian art, typically considered a Western phenomenon, to include key names from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. It includes student presentations of themes related to dystopia as presented in works from various cultures and countries of origin.