France

In this course students work hands-on with silk screen to create original prints. This course allows for a combination of media such as Photoshop, design, and drawing to be used in making work. Projects allow for different techniques and hands-on experience and range from prints to small booklets to printing onto fabric.

The course has two parts: the first consists of presenting the different fields and history of linguistics, as well as certain fundamental concepts and theories in language sciences (structuralism, generativism, functions of language). The second part focuses on traditional grammar, covering topics such as classification into grammatical categories (parts of speech) and grammatical functions, as well as the concepts of simple and complex sentences.

This course is an introduction to the history of epidemics from the Neolithic period to neoliberal twenty-first century. It adopts an original angle: the perspective of planetary health, a recently emerged framework that proposes to address the interplay between health and disease, local environments, and the planetary crisis. The course engages simultaneously with the history of medicine (including the legacies of Hippocratic and medieval theories of epidemics), with global history (trade, war, colonialism, international governance), and with environmental history (emergence of pathogens, ecological transformation, multi-species histories, Anthropocene studies). Exploring examples including cholera, plague, Covid-19, and HIV-AIDS, it explores how epidemics are embedded within wider pathogenic ecologies shaped by political structures, planetary change, and human (in)action and ignorance. To do so, it follows a “place-based” approached, which avoids the repetitive and sometimes stereotypical genre of epidemic narratives. Focus is also placed on greater Paris as a region marked by the experience of epidemics and epidemic control.

The extensive independent study field research paper produced by the student is both the centerpiece of the intern's professional engagement and the culmination of the academic achievements of the semester. During the preparatory session, IFE teaches the methodological guidelines and principles to which students are expected to adhere in the development of their written research. Students work individually with a research advisor from their field. The first task is to identify a topic, following guidelines established by IFE for research topic choice. The subject must be tied in a useful and complementary way to the student-intern's responsibilities, as well as to the core concerns of the host organization. The research question should be designed to draw as much as possible on resources available to the intern via the internship (data, documents, interviews, observations, seminars and the like). Students begin to focus on this project after the first 2-3 weeks on the internship. Each internship agreement signed with an organization makes explicit mention of this program requirement, and this is the culminating element of their semester. Once the topic is identified, students meet individually, as regularly as they wish, with their IFE research advisor to generate a research question from the topic, develop an outline, identify sources and research methods, and discuss drafts submitted by the student. The research advisor also helps students prepare for the oral defense of their work which takes place a month before the end of the program and the due date of the paper. The purpose of this exercise is to help students evaluate their progress and diagnose the weak points in their outline and arguments. Rather than an extraneous burden added to the intern's other duties, the field research project grows out of the internship through a useful and rewarding synergy of internship and research. The Field Study and Internship model results in well-trained student-interns fully engaged in mission-driven internships in their field, while exploring a critical problem guided by an experienced research advisor.

This course focuses on the history of communication, starting with Greece and Rome, and continuing on to more present development in the area. Some examples include: Antique, The Reform, Renaudot, telegraph, and photo. In the second part of the course, students are presented with theories such as Cybernetics, School of Frankfurt, Structuralism, School of Chicago, Lasswell and propaganda, Functionalists, and the work of Lazarsfeld.

This course uses a literary approach to political themes founded on the reflective and aesthetic values of certain works. This approach is supplemented by a philosophical, moral, and political reading of the works from an internal and external viewpoint which place them in their historical context and measure their weight outside of that context. This course develops a reflection on the political fable genre. After a general introduction (overview of Rabelais, Boccalini, Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Huxley), the course centers on a formal, structural, and moral analysis of two famous collections of fables which use a philosophical and ironical approach: the 12 books of La Fontaine's fables and the 33 chapters of Tchouang-tseu as an art on the variation. In these different philosophical, satirical, didactic fables, the course studies the following double dimensions: political/moral, lucidity/illusion, wisdom/folly, animal/human, direct allusion/indirect allusion, and irony/humor. The art of the variation is defined in the different arts and contexts.

This course covers China's relationships with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian countries. The discussion does not include India and the rest of the South Asian countries. The course infers the principles of China's move and behavior toward Afghanistan and the South-Central Asian countries, historically and during Xi's era, and analyzes the effects on the South-Central Asian region and trans-regionally. Additional topics include China's geo-economic and security ambitions in South-Central Asia, counter-terrorism, and a broader picture of the World Order.