University of Bordeaux

The lecture part of this course focuses on the history of silent film. The discussion section focuses on the analysis of the cultural and aesthetic issues of silent film. Cinema was born with the films of the Lumière brothers. The course traces the turbulent history of silent films and experimental film, but also considers how certain forms were gradually imposed and why the transition to talkies was so late. The course relies on a large number of excerpts from the diverse film industries of various countries and films. The works of Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein, and Buster Keaton may be covered. This course teaches students how to exercise and practice film analysis. Through the use of several films, the course familiarizes students with analytical tools and tests their knowledge. The discussion is a continuation of the course of history of cinema; the examples considered have the distinction of being silent films.

As one of the oldest and most perplexing phenomena in human society, political corruption exists in almost every country in the contemporary world. Social scientists and policy makers have long been baffled by the relationship between corruption and political and economic development and the question of how to successfully contain corruption. Conventional wisdom is that corruption harms rule of law, demoralizes the society, and inhibits economic growth. But it is more often assumed than tested and proven. Much has been written about political corruption. Yet many questions still remain. This course addresses five sets of broad questions that are most common in the discourse on corruption and governance: definition of corruption; causes of corruption; patterns of corruption; consequences of corruption; and control of corruption. This intensive short course—conducted in four-day lectures and discussions—introduces students to theories and key social science debates on the causes and effects of political corruption. Through discussions about whether corruption hurts economic development and political stability, this course provides a better understanding of the impact of corruption on bureaucracy, the economy, and society at large. At the end of the course, students make an assessment for mapping out strategies and codes of conduct to control corruption.

In this course, students learn how the relationships between actors affect the control of territories and resources. The following topics are covered: who are the actors; what scale are they at; what are the power relationships; what are the conflicts, etc. The course analyzes actors roles in different geographic, economic, political, and environmental conflicts.

This course provides an in-depth look at French business law. It is comprised of three sections: Essential notions of civil law, obligations, classification of obligations, contracts, and legal action; Commercial activity concerning producers and business assets; Introduction to the law of society, communal rules of commercial society and an overview of current commercial societies.

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.

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 provides an in-depth look at how to assess the economic impact of cultural goods. It builds on a foundation of how to define cultural goods, how to define the marketplace for common goods, and economic imperfections encountered in this marketplace. Social issues, such as class stratification to the consumption of cultural goods, are covered. This class studies the social issues that arise from the economics of consumption of cultural goods.

National myth and international event, the French Revolution (1789-1799) has fascinated writers and filmmakers and continues to spark debate. Like History in general, its controversial and spectacular dimension makes it a privileged meeting place between the arts (literature, painting, cinema, musicals, and more recently video game, with ASSASSINS' CREED UNITY, released in November 2014). The course considers how literature and cinema deal with the great revolutionary motives (the insurgent city, the people, the political debate, the violence), which generic and poetic forms are solicited (chronicle, epic, lyricism, etc.). Finally, the course considers what cinema owes to literature and how it is emancipated from it.