France

This interdisciplinary course examines the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement experienced by residents of the "other France"—a France comprised of working-class citizens often of immigrant origin and from France’s former colonies. It introduces students to urban sociology by requiring that they focus on the particular problems experienced by social actors who live in economically and socially disfavored parts of Paris. Topics covered include urban sociological theories, de-facto segregation, poverty, crime, schooling, public policy, national identity, the negotiation of bi-culturality, and the French secularizing mission. Students investigate these topics from a variety of sources, ranging from documentary film and photojournalism to literary and cinematic expressions. Via these sources, students become familiar with a vibrant urban "vernacular" culture that contests issues pertaining to citizenship, racialization, and representation.

This course explores the architectural and pictorial inheritance of France, including urban and countryside architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts. It focuses on the architecture of Bordeaux and the region of Aquitaine during the 19th century. It presents the remarkable sites of the New Aquitaine region listed as World Heritage by UNESCO by analyzing some works to better understand them. The course discovers the region and its rich heritage through the ages, from prehistory with the parietal caves of the Dordogne to the contemporary era with the city of Fruges by Le Corbusier, passing through the Middle Age and modern times. Various arts are analyzed, including visual art, painting, sculpture, and the art of space which concerns architecture and heritage. Similarly, the course studies several styles, in particular Romanesque art, Gothic art, and classical art to acquire an artistic culture.

Since the 1983's March for equality and against racism (“Marche des Beurs”), up until the current debates on Islamism separatism, the French public sphere is struggling with a new intellectual debate, which can be described as “the postcolonial question”. By defining and questioning this phrasing, this course first establishes a political history of immigration in France, and how it has deeply defined and redefined the definitions of social progress. Moreover, using diverse approaches in social science, the course explains this rising issue of identity politics in France which seems to have deeply impacted the political scene. The appearance of this issue is mostly due to economic crises, recent immigration waves and diverse social and political movements which stirred a topical debate on the notion of identity - but also the parallels established with the American debate on race and gender, and how the French university has used (or refused) these categories. Analyzing the evolution of immigration and Islam in France, and how the administration has tried to address these stakes, the course discusses political and religious phenomena which currently are one of the main fault lines within French parties - both within the left and the right, on the question of integration or assimilation, on a liberal or strict vision of laïcité. The teaching mainly focuses on France, in order to understand the consequences of these events as a matter of domestic policy. However, those dynamics are systematically compared to foreign similar events and replaced in a Euro-Mediterranean context through a comprehensive chronology.

This course teaches the fundamentals of econometrics, in particular regression analysis and statistical inference. It purposefully starts at a level that assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, econometrics, or programming. The objective is to understand and interpret simple and multiple linear regressions and detect whether an analysis uncovers correlations or causality. The course does not rely on advanced math; rather it uses practical learning to teach the main concepts. Moreover, it introduces how to use R, a very powerful and widely used programming language, to perform data cleaning and undertake statistical analyses. By the end of the course, students carry out small-scale research projects using real-world data and regression analysis to reveal associations between various variables.

This course observes how speech is orchestrated to a choreography of the human body. It examines how meanings, abstract or concrete, are not only produced but actually performed on the interactional stage. The course provides an opportunity to observe facial expressions and co-speech gestures in silent movies and explore how speech production necessarily comes with gestural action. This multimodal course combines formal research seminars, animated classroom discussions, creative workshop sessions, and film screenings.

This course studies what legitimate authority is, under what conditions states have it, how law participates in legitimate authority, and how philosophical issues about legitimate authority are represented in positive law. It provides a grasp on the philosophical debate on legitimate state authority that can be applied in practice as jurists.

This course offers a critical examination of the resurgence of “folk horror cinema” in British cinema since the 2000s. Based on cultural references involving neo-pagan cults, witchcraft, and a largely fantasized rewriting of the national past in terms of pre-Christian heritage, this profoundly ambiguous tradition has variously been re-appropriated by feminist as well as masculinist discourses and has given rise to a range of aesthetic propositions, from exploitation cinema to “elevated horror,” and analyzes how British and American horror cinemas have both developed a subgenre based on stories that resort to some folklore deeply engrained in a country’s traditions. Using recurring themes like religion, hostile landscapes, and supernatural creatures, these films rely on man’s deepest fears, and they may also be a means for some artists to criticize the human tendency to act in some superstitious and harmful ways.

This course offers an introduction to social movement studies, a dynamic field of academic studies that has grown in prominence for the past several decades. It focuses on the protests that have emerged and developed in the United States since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, as the United States has been home to a wide range of movements and counter-movements that have attempted to define or redefine notions such as equality, justice, and democracy. Throughout the world the 2010s and 2020s have been characterized by innovative or renewed forms of contentious politics that directly challenged the political status quo and neoliberal hegemony. Topics include Occupy Wall Street; the Tea Party; the 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol; the January 2021 attacks on the federal Capitol in Washington, D.C.; the 2012 Chicago teachers' strike and the 2018-2019 teachers' strikes in predominantly Republican states; the recent successful organizing efforts at Amazon and Starbucks; the different iterations of the Movement for Black Lives; far-right rallies under the Trump presidency; campaigns against campus sexual assault in the early 2010s; the worldwide #MeToo movement and anti-feminist reactions fueled by the so-called men's rights movement; the 2016 No Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the Green New Deal; and corporate misinformation campaigns, behind-closed-doors lobbying, and judicial battles waged by Big Oil companies against environmental justice movements.

This course is comprised of three components: oral comprehension, oral expression, and phonetics. The comprehension part focuses on enhancing student's oral comprehension though radio, video, note-taking, and oral or written reproduction. The expression part of the course provides an opportunity to give oral presentations alone or in groups, with structured argumentation and role-playing. The phonetics part examines basic concepts of articulatory phonetics and French phonology, including perceptual phenomena, segmental and supra-segmental features, linking, neutralization, assimilation, germination, individual and dialectal variations, written and oral systems, and discourse analysis. Emphasis is placed on the acquisition of French pronunciation, as well as oral and gestural expression.