France

This course explores the intersection between food cultures and food politics, with an eye towards arguments and debates that have animated French culinary culture. How is food a portal for studying the changing dynamics of cities, global systems, and national identity? In what ways has food been employed to construct notions of community and belonging? Through discussions of interdisciplinary course readings, reporting and writing assignments, and excursions around the city of Paris, students consider how food structures identities, everyday practices, and political lives. Topics include food as a lens through which to study power and social relations in national, global, and local contexts; French culinary concepts, debates, and institutions as contested and dynamic ideas; everyday food practices in Paris; and food cultures and food politics in France and the United States.

This course addresses how history has been punctuated by civil resistance and disobedience movements whose characteristics, combats, tools, and arms get more sophisticated, shared, and reinvented as time moves forward. It identifies the news as a marker of movements of citizen protest, social opposition, demonstrations (such as Climate), and other acts of disobedience. From Thoreau to Gandhi, from Martin Luther King to the Extinction Rebellion movement, from Radio London (1940-1944) to the fight for the Larzac or the ZAD of Notre-Dames-des-Landes, this course explores how specific movements are born and fed and how media plays a role in the development or the resonance of these actions, from yesterday's press to modern platforms. The course includes analysis, readings, and deconstruction of what is called “civil disobedience and resistance,” in both democracies and authoritarian countries, from yesterday to today.

This course provides students with a clear idea of the diversity of European social policies, their political background, and allows for the assessment of their performance. The course also provides an in-depth account of current welfare reforms, in the perspective of their historical development. The social science analysis concepts (de-/re-commodification, path dependency, Varieties of Capitalisms) are used in order to understand the issues at stake in recent debates concerning the welfare state and the trajectories of their reforms.