France

From the contemporary to the extreme contemporary, this course offers a journey through literature. It provides an opportunity to discover, through the study of a few authors and excerpts from various works, how French literature of the last decades takes on a form of engagement and disengagement in the uncertainty that creates our present. The course sharpens sensitivity and broadens knowledge in the literary and cultural fields. It improves mastery of the French language to develop the capacities of analysis, synthesis, and criticism essential to intellectual work. The course focuses on the novel, the short story, and the theater on the path of renewal at the borders of reality and fiction: telling again and again, telling the real in times of crisis.

This course is designed to explore what it takes to be a successful diplomat. The course works under the premise that many "qualified" leaders too often disqualify themselves by lacking the basic communication, presentation, leadership, empathy, and listening skills amongst many others. This workshop-style seminar highlights the most essential soft skills that are needed to make it in the world of politics. Toward that end, this course includes the teaching of advanced techniques for delivering great speeches as well as successfully taking charge and winning complex communication settings like negotiation, mediation, interviews, and debates. Media training, body language, emotional intelligence as well as negotiation strategies are the common thread underlying all lectures to practice the art of public speaking and negotiating. While this course develops these skills in a political and diplomatic setting, all techniques described and taught are applicable to any communication setting regardless of the occupation and background of the communicator. All skills reviewed in this course are presented from a theoretical point of view and taken into consideration with different layers of analysis: social, cultural, educational, religious, and generational background to name a few. In addition, the course offers a specific lecture designed for future women diplomats and political leaders to discuss the different pressures placed on them in a political communication setting and to raise awareness among male students.

This course experiments with and develops the techniques and graphic gestures including drawing, imprint, stencil, monotype, screen printing, photomontage, frame-by-frame animation, and cut papers. Sessions are accompanied by image analyses to encourage students to explore to the many possible forms of representation and help situate their practice in the field of current creation. In addition to class sessions, a regular practice provides an opportunity to produce more elaborate works and gain autonomy and singularity.

This course introduces the lexicographical approach implemented in language dictionaries as well as different types of relation and construction of meaning in lexicon. The course covers synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, hyponymy, hyperonymy, derivatives and compounds, and the phenomena of multiple meanings. It provides an opportunity to practice categorizing and organizing the uses of words in the form of mock dictionary entries.

This course explores various concepts of economic inequality, including a consideration of measurement and data issues. It reviews key theories about the relationship between economic inequality and economic development, including the causes and consequences of inequality levels.

The course deals with substantive, procedural and political issues relating to international criminal justice, its origins, reach, legitimacy, and articulation with (post-) conflict management and peace making. It covers historical and recent international and national efforts undertaken to address these crimes. After presenting the framework and principles of international criminal justice, the course discusses contemporaneous issues. Experts and practitioners contribute to equipping students with the tools necessary to understand the role and impact of justice in international affairs.

The course provides a general and comprehensive approach to world affairs while introducing the international legal perspective. It covers both the essentials of public international law and particular legal regimes such as coercion, use of force, human rights, State territory, and space law with respect to selected world affairs and international conflicts. The course highlights the interaction between international politics and law and the role of international law in the world governance. It’s focus both on theory and practice and on interdisciplinarity allows a better understanding of international negotiation, norm-making, legal argumentation, and interpretative techniques.

This course introduces the field of social network analysis (SNA). Social networks are ubiquitous nowadays; SNA emerged in the 1960s as a vibrant social science specialty trying to give substance to individuals, not through their inner psychological and demographic, or professional characteristics but through the relationships they entertain with their social environment. The first objective of this class is to introduce the concepts and metrics designed and theorized by this specific stream of sociology and test how operative they still are in our connected environment. How useful are centrality or cohesion measures today? What can we learn about our current online world with concepts forged in the 1960s and the 1970s like homophily, transitivity, cohesion, diffusion processes? To do so, this course examines the seminal papers in SNA. However, this intellectual journey is complemented by a more hands-on approach, as half of the course is devoted to teaching the students basic operations in Python such that they can collect data from digital social media platforms before modeling, measuring, and visualizing this data using recent network analysis libraries. The course puts the ancient concepts of SNA to the test and assesses how fruitful they are in understanding online interaction data. No prior coding experience is required as the course extensively uses AI capacities (such as Gemini, directly available in Google Colab notebooks) to assist with coding. The class alternates readings of historical sociology papers and more contemporaneous articles typical of the digital age mixing concepts from SNA in the larger realm of computational social sciences. Most classes are split into three parts: the discussion around a scientific paper, a lecture about a new SNA-related concept, and a third part where students are invited to experiment on their own laptops with the newly introduced concepts, metrics, or algorithms with empirical data.

This course offers an introduction to the key concepts, theories, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence on social inequality and social mobility. First, it focuses on the structure of inequality; considering how unequal societies are today and how and why this has changed in recent decades.  Second, the course discusses who gets to occupy privileged positions in society and why. It explores how characteristics that are not in peoples' control, such as socio-economic background, shape important outcomes in their lives, such as their level of education, their job, or their income. Finally, it explores what policies can reduce inequality of opportunity in society.

This course provides a general overview of secularism in the world. Reading texts, scientific articles, press articles, and historical documents, it reviews case studies with a comparative approach from political science, history, sociology, philosophy, and theology. Topics include the regime of separation of the Churches and the State in France, the secular state, the American civil religion, the Italian concordat, the Danish case, Turkey, the Mexican separation, and the Belgian derogatory regime.