France

This course addresses the historical depth and most recent cases of terrorism in Europe and in other regions of the world with a combined traditional and critical view. It offers a complete overview of terrorism, the diversity of its direct and indirect use, as well as its most contemporary trends.

This is an intermediate level French language course for students who have previously completed two or more semesters of French. Building on the basics of the language and utilizing good listening comprehension skills, the course builds students’ confidence in their ability to communicate. It focuses on understanding expressions and common vocabulary relevant to one’s persona life, including family, purchases, surrounding environment, studies, and work. The course builds skills to understand advertisements, announcements, and simple clear messages; read short, simple texts; and find specific predictable information in common documents such as short advertisements, brochures, menus, and timetables; understand short simple personal letters and emails; communicate during simple, habitual tasks that demand only an exchange of simple, direct information on subjects and activities that are familiar; have brief exchanges, using a series of sentences or expressions to describe in simple terms family or other people, living circumstances, education, and current or recent professional or academic activities; write notes and simple, short messages; and write a personal letter or email that is focused and structured, such as a thank you letter.

This course requires international students to facilitate ten conversation sessions in their maternal language (English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) to French-speaking students. The conversation groups have a maximum of seven students. At the end of the semester, conversation workshop teachers are graded based on evaluations by the French students and a reflective report assignment.

This course introduces the spatial effects the law has in everyday life's urban spaces, problems related to geography in general, and cities in specific. It examines the relationship between space and law, and how law and legal theory are essential starting points in understanding cities and vice versa. The course also confronts legal and social theories using architecture, literature, film, art, and legal ethnographic approaches. It addresses inquiries such as how law creates space; how national and international laws construct cities; how law, literature, and film represent cities; and how it is possible to do legal research in this field.

Through a series of concept-letters, this course uncovers various approaches to politics. It covers a selection of classical and contemporary notions, doctrines, and various styles of reasoning, and presents their usefulness for the city. It considers what these doctrines and reasonings mean for today's citizens, and how they can be mobilized to understand political issues and act in a just, democratic, and responsible way. Beyond abstract reasoning, the course reflects on the articulation between theory and practice; deliberates contemporary social and moral problems; discusses the formal understanding of political phenomena and the way they are understood, implemented, or contested by individuals and groups; and finally, demonstrates that philosophical concepts are not only elaborated in the realm of ideas, but are inspired by and act upon in the political and social world.

This course highlights 1960s, or the “Sixties,” as a puzzling concept in many respects. It uses the concept of the “Sixties” to move beyond both the chronological limits of 1960-1969 and the purely temporal framing of the term. It studies a longer timeframe spanning almost twenty years from the start of the Civil Rights movement (Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955) to the end of the Vietnam War (fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975). It addresses the historical period as defined in international and domestic terms, but also according to geopolitical, political, economic, social, and cultural change; as an era but also a zeitgeist, a time of specific social and cultural effervescence. The course develops a nuanced knowledge of this key period of United States history. Topics include the counterculture, social activism, feminism, and the rises of a New Left and a New Right.