France

Grounded in a multidisciplinary approach (political science, history, sociology and anthropology), this course explores key themes in African politics: colonial legacies, state-formation, nation-building, styles of leadership, political regimes, citizenship, democratization, ethnicity, religious pluralism, war and peace, and African diasporas. The course enables students: to acquire a knowledge and understanding of both general trends on the continent and more in-depth history and contemporary politics of particular African countries; to learn to analyze and explain the political processes and institutions of African countries and to situate them in their social and economic context; to provide students with an understanding of current debates in African Studies and politics in the Global South; to open up informed comparison between African case-studies and other emerging countries in South Asia, the Middle-East or Latin America-to acquaint students with first-hand empirical material (archives, datasets, films, novels).

Sign language poses many challenges for linguistic research: its visual-gestural communication, its vocabulary, and its grammar in three dimensions make it necessary to reconsider certain concepts and tools used in analyzing vocal languages. This course addresses questions touching on the writing of sign language, its history, the cultural and linguistic community of deaf people, and the philosophy and politics surrounding sign language and the deaf community.

This course is dedicated to the political theory of comparative modernities, engaging with debates about the fractured character of modern experiences both through canonical texts of Euro-American Enlightenment and those traditions that emerged against its underside in slavery and imperialism in the “Black Atlantic”. The course program is structured around three revolutionary moments: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. The course covers texts that informed these events or emerged as a response to them–some of them fueled by a commitment to emancipatory change, others vehemently opposed to the violent upheaval they entailed. Readings stretch from texts in the political theory canon (Locke, Hegel, Burke, and Marx), to minoritarian sources from within the Euro-American tradition (including American abolitionist Frederick Douglass and French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges), to an engagement with oral traditions at the margins of Western intellectual history, such as those of maroon slaves. In reading theories of revolution and empire in the Atlantic world, the course attends to the silences within canonical texts, while assessing the relevance and potential that Enlightenment thought might still hold today. Drawing on recent debates about comparative political theory and the imperial turn in the history of ideas, this class is meant to both engage with and problematize the Euro-American theory canon in ways that speak to issues of class, race, and gender.

The main objective of this course is the acquisition of language and basic probabilistic and statistical concepts, and their uses in computer science. The student must apply mathematical skills, logic, and reasoning. This course deals with notions of probability, statistics, and combinatorics. The teaching focuses on discrete probabilities (event concept, probabilistic calculation rules, conditional probabilities, random variables, expectation, variance, probability laws: uniform, binomial, geometric and Poisson). Practical manipulations (simulation and implementation) deepen the theoretical notions of the course. The link with certain continuous laws is approached (normal law, exponential). On the combinatorial aspects, the notions of elementary counts (i.e., sums, products, combinations), recurrences and generating function are approached and applied to the counting of words, sequences and discrete structures usual in computer science. Descriptive statistics (i.e., series, histograms, mean, standard deviation) and an introduction to hypothesis testing are also discussed.

This course looks at the transnational players and globalization practices in Africa. Topics covered in the course include: how do we measure globalization; the macroeconomic fictions in Africa; political commerce in Africa; triptology of State, financial institutions, and the private sector; cultural globalization; a dynamic of flows and closures; ports of transport and international ports; African villages; African/Chinese relations in commerce and politics; tourism and disenchantments.

This course is an introduction to the concepts, debates, the normative and empirical study of terrorism and counter-terrorism. The course is divided into three main sections. The first part discusses the meanings of concepts such as terrorism and political violence, and analyzes the causes and evolution of the threat. The second part looks at the different ways in which democracies responded to terrorism after 9/11–United States of America, United Kingdom, and France–and the dilemmas they face as they attempt to contend with this threat. The third part focuses on the current debate about security versus liberty: is this idea anything more than just a metaphor used by politicians to justify further limitations on freedom? This question is examined in the light of the main philosophical approaches to value conflict.

This course covers the elements of French urban planning law, including: the different sources of law and the hierarchy of legal norms; the place of planning law in the French legal system; urban planning authorizations and sources of land law (planning documentation); what urban planning litigation is and how the administrative tribunal works; the legal tools of operational urban planning.

This course furnishes the necessary elements for understanding cities and their development. It delineates the diverse aspects of cities and the large phases in urban spaces and societies. This includes the origins of cities and the large cycles of urbanization up until recent turns (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). This includes both physical aspects as well as social ones. This course focuses on: archeology and ancient cities in Mesopotamia and Mediterranean; the cities from the middle age until the eighteenth century, including colonialism; the nineteenth century and industrialization; housing and urban development.