France

This workshop for advanced level students (C1 and C2) offers a framework, space, and means to approach creative writing in French. In a relaxed environment, the workshop provides an opportunity to discover authors in touch with the current world, express sensitivity, and exchange ideas about French literature, particularly contemporary literature. The workshop consists of exploring various authors and genres to find one’s personal style and voice in French; story writing; cinematographic, theatrical, radio, and poetic writing. Linguistically, students develop the ability to characterize, in writing, the multiple descriptions (places, characters, emotions) contained in their productions; orally contextualize and justify the choices made in their writing; question texts and authors with delicacy and subtlety; and express feelings. The workshop provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s relationship to writing (pleasure, anxiety, necessity) as well as one’s relationship to writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue (frustrations, freedom of expression).

This course provides an introduction to the concepts, formalism, and applications of quantum mechanics in different disciplinary fields of science and technology: mathematics, computer science and information technology, basic physics, and physico-chemistry. It includes instruction from specialists within these disciplines in connection with current research issues. 

This course is structured in two parts, theoretical and practical, and examines the diverging ontological, epistemological, and political frameworks to resolve the biosphere crisis to the human habitability of planet Earth. The first part of the course compares post-dualist approaches (advocating the abandonment of the society-nature distinction) with the theories that recognize a heuristic and epistemological value of the society-nature dualism. The second part of the course maps the range of policies, ideologies, and collective actions in response to the climate disaster: from neo-Malthusian eco-fascism defending a nationalist rootedness in the territory; to the liberal eco-modernism of green growth; as well as the socialist project of a Green New Deal and the agroecological peasant movement, La Via Campesina.

The course provides the latest methodological and theoretical tools for understanding the politics of urbanization and urbanism. The course takes the politics of urbanism as a transdisciplinary arena. It encourages thinking across disciplinary boundaries to address the environmental and social challenges of the present. The question of how cities act politically on the global scale is widely discussed and receives diverse answers from researchers. The course suggests that the study of the political agency shall be grounded in urban studies and empirically tested on different layers of policymaking, allowing for hybrid combinations. An urban studies approach addresses the spatial and temporal specificity of urban processes, in contrast with the "methodological nationalism" of large parts of the social sciences. It focuses critically on spatialized social processes and socio-material assemblages, combinations of objects and agencies that affect how cities are organized and, to some extent, governed.

This seminar explores American foreign policy from within. It studies the actors making it, their purpose, and the constraints they face. US foreign policy making is shaped by both American culture and the peculiarities of American democracy. Conversely, the constraints and the imperatives inherent to the conduct of foreign policy can sometimes endanger democratic principles. The course analyzes the fundamental debates over these issues and considers their evolution over time through in-depth case studies.