France

This course addresses how institutions constrain and enable the potential for political cooperation and shape political decision making. In particular, through the readings, the course investigates key questions of political analysis including how institutions are designed, how they shape individual and collective behavior, how they vary over time, and how they are resisted.

This course covers the recent developments in experimental and behavioral economics as well as their extension into neuroeconomics. It demonstrates how developments in cognitive psychology and neural exploration in the subjective representations of the stakeholders have enriched the discipline at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. The course investigates several iterations of this young sector which is being shaped by a never-before-seen cooperation between the hard sciences and the social sciences by showcasing several applications: monetary incentivization, entrepreneurship behavior and attention control, behavioral finances, risk attitudes, the rules of cooperation, the role of knowledge and belief in decision making, the mechanisms of coordination, et cetera.

The focus of this course is upon representations of the links between the British Empire and colonialism from the 1930s to the present time in colonial and postcolonial cinema. Students explore a variety of perspectives, from postcolonial studies to gender and cultural studies, in order to examine how the empire film relies on figures and stereotypes that the cinemas of decolonization and the diasporas re-appropriate through strategies of irony and subversion. Students study the way the identification of the nation to gendered figures informs narratives and representations and how female directors have offered alternative discourses in various contexts of production.

This course highlights the unique link between the school and the Republic. It first investigates the origins of the school in the West and the eventual establishment of elite education systems by the Church. It then examines how the political landscape throughout the centuries and the call for education for the masses evolved into the school model of today, particularly during the Fifth Republic following the election of the president by direct universal suffrage. The course addresses the web of crises and tensions surrounding the democratization of education that persist today.