France

This course explores the complex regulatory environment of AI systems, which ranges from regulations and governance instruments to ethical principles and industry standards. It starts with an introductory session explaining what AI technologies are, zooms in on their benefits and the novel risks they give rise to, and investigates the role different legal modules can play in regulating them. At the end of the semester, it explores the question of whether the race for AI will thwart regulatory efforts, and to what extent ethical principles can serve as a complement to legal and industry norms.

This course introduces and presents the authors and founding texts of contemporary thought; the latest works in social and political sciences, whether by philosophers, essayists, scientists, or today's key players: political decision-makers, tech innovators, and ideologists working behind the scenes to influence the world of tomorrow. All are pioneers of the most hotly debated theories. Our era is one of great ideological conflict. Antagonistic conceptions of what the future of our societies will or could look like are clashing. Each class session is an opportunity to address these disruptive ideas, which largely break down traditional categories. Four major themes bring together the most recent analyses and doctrines: new practices of power, ecological reflections that pit ideas of progress against those of degrowth in unprecedented terms, artificial intelligence as a threat or an opportunity for our societies, and finally, the questioning of traditional economic models that have always been taken for granted. A journey through the works of Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and inspirer of Trumpism, to those of Giuliano da Empoli, the thinker behind the “new predators.” It is also be an opportunity to compare the ecological thinking of Jean-Marc Jancovici's Shift Project with Naomi Klein's radical ideas.

This course focuses primarily on the study of French diplomatic actors, their practices, and their interactions with their counterparts in various contexts, including international crisis management, multilateral negotiation processes, and power relations within the French state. At the same time, it encourages students to produce an analysis, to generalize where possible, and to propose theoretical explanations for the social phenomena studied. Designed as an interactive seminar, this course provides participants with an opportunity to refine their understanding of the issues involved and sharpen their critical thinking skills by reading selected texts and meeting with key players in the field. Thus, diplomats with varied profiles are invited to at least two sessions to allow the group to compare academic perspectives with practitioners' experiences and, for those particularly interested in careers at the Quai d'Orsay, to gain a concrete understanding of the profession. The approach draws mainly on political science, but also on sociology and history, in a multidisciplinary perspective to shed as much light as possible on the subject in all its complexity.

This course centralizes the use of feminist legal theory as a serious mode of inquiry into analyzing law, legal reasoning, and legal reform. It studies four dominant strands of contemporary feminist legal theory, including liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, critical race feminism, and postmodern feminism in queer theory. While this course focuses on common law-based perspectives of feminism, it uses these diverse terrains of feminist legal thought in order to analyze challenges and various areas in social and public discourse internationally. Thus, while the first part of the course is dedicated to acquiring the useful knowledge and background of strands of feminism, the second part of the course creatively applies these tools in practical areas of sex equality issues in employment, consent, abortion, transgender rights, prostitution, and pornography.

This is a beginner level French language course for students who have previously completed one or two semesters of French. It focuses on the four skills of listening comprehension, spoken production, reading comprehension, and written expression. It develops skills to understand audio and video with multiple speakers, talk about events that happened in the past, describe objects and images, conduct a simple discussion and give an opinion, read and understand short texts, write a short informal letter or email. It covers adjectives, comparatives, superlatives, pronouns, adverbs, indefinites, prepositions, verbs, vocabulary for real-life situations, phonetics and spelling. 

This is a beginner level Italian language course for students with no prior Italian language background. It teaches listening comprehension, spoken production, reading comprehension, and written expression in Italian. It focuses on understanding instructions and following a very simple conversation that relates to everyday life, introducing and talking about ones self, asking questions about someone else, understanding a very simple text relating to daily life, writing a dialogue, short text or email. The course covers articles, nouns, adjectives, demonstratives, possessives, pronouns, adverbs, numbers, prepositions, interrogatives, verbs, vocabulary for real-life situations, and phonetics and spelling.

This course provides a panorama of how behavioral approaches can help to understand key issues in the political and social sciences. It examines the central cognitive and behavioral processes relevant to the analysis of social and political dynamics. Through a combination of formal lectures and class discussion, the course provides the tools necessary to apply a behavioral perspective to political and social issues. Furthermore, the methodological and theoretical limitations and challenges of these approaches are discussed throughout the semester in order to enable students to think and apply these approaches critically.

This course examines the role of popular distrust (e.g., perceptions of government corruption, waste, abuse) in contemporary democratic and electoral-authoritarian regimes. It probes contradictions in how scholars approach distrust within democracy. It explores how distrust gets politicized and interacts with institutions and inequalities to drive participation and political violence; reactions to public spending, taxation, public-health risk and conspiracy theories; and voting behavior among groups who feel threatened (economically, culturally). By foregrounding questions of power and state capacity—and what remains of them—in the minds of voters facing new social risks, this course offers a path to harness the mobilizing force of distrust within a neo-republican framework.

This course explores the formation and development of educational thought throughout Western history. It analyzes the influence that the rise of modern democracy - and the social, philosophical, and political transformations it entailed - had on our vision of education. As the Church's authority gradually declined in the eighteenth century with the emergence of Enlightenment ideas, new ways of thinking about the role of the state and the purpose of education emerged. Education became increasingly tied to political life and was seen as a central element for the development and stability of modern democratic societies. A central theme throughout the course, therefore, concerns the political function of education: Who should control education? Why should the state intervene? For whom is it intended? The course studies the way various thinkers have thought about the purpose of education, whether it is to shape moral character, to prepare citizens for civic life, to train workers for economic productivity or to foster personal emancipation and freedom. By studying the long and complex history of educational thought in its political and social contexts, this course offers an invaluable training for thinking critically and flexibly about the political challenges of our own time.

This course covers advanced theories of International Relations. The course explores central questions of international politics by examining the different traditions of thought about the character and nature of "the international." The course goes beyond realist and liberal theories to explore a counter-history of the theory on international politics and covers topics such as Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, international political sociology, migration, environmental studies, and critical approaches to the international order and its institutional structures. The course examines how "the international" was constructed as a field of study throughout capitalist modernity, and how these theories are connected to the practice of international relations. It ends by relating international theory to contemporary events, such as the global war on terror and the rise of the far-right.