France

This course examines gender and its critical intersections with power in contemporary social and political life. It reflects on key definitions, ideas, debates, and controversies in gender studies, using an interdisciplinary set of readings in history, sociology, anthropology, international relations, political science, literary studies, and critical theory. Some questions that considered include: How are gender and sex being explained as natural and social phenomena? In what ways is gender interacting with other social identities e.g. sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nationality? How is gender shaping individual identity and popular culture?

This course focuses on the geography and impact of the Mediterranean sea on its surrounding countries. It examines the environmental and geopolitical impacts of the Mediterranean.

This course studies the signs and causes of party democracy crisis and the changing political conflict brought on by multilevel governance, globalization, and manifestations of political apathy, among other phenomena, which defy the way contemporary democracies work. Considering how the terms of the political conflict in Western democracies are changing significantly due to economic, cultural, and political transformations, the course analyzes the transformation of the political conflict and the attitudinal change behind it; the changing party systems and the rise of new challenger, populist, and radical right parties; changes in the patterns of political behavior; globalization, the increase in inequality, and the political consequences of both; the increase in polarization; the crisis of parties and party government and occurrences of democratic backsliding.

This course explores the major questions raised by the ambition of today's literature to render justice, as well as the risks of public and even legal contestation to which it is exposed. By browsing works that have given rise to a public debate, scandal, or even lawsuit, and exposing the terms of the controversy and its stakes (the difference between fiction and testimony, the rights of the characters in the face of romantic or family settling of accounts, the limits of the representable, the debates on cultural appropriation, the traumatic risks of reading, the search for transgression, new forms of censorship, etc.), this course introduces contemporary literature in its liveliest and most political form. It also returns to major societal issues (the rise of populism, social crises, the Me Too affair, contemporary family recompositions, debates on postcolonialism, racialism, etc.) from an original angle: that of the story of fiction.