University of Bordeaux

This course provides the historical background to the recent intensification of global exchanges, helps assess the significance of these developments, and draws comparisons between past and present experience. The course examines many different chapters of global history and travel on various continents including medieval Europe, pre-Columbus America, and the great civilizations of Asia. It acquaints students with the social, environmental, political, and economic debates and controversies surrounding the emergence of “global capitalism.”

This course focuses on beginning French writing. Students are expected to produce written texts using the new vocabulary and grammar structure they learned in the oral comprehension class.

This course in oral production is intended to improve engagement in conversations through the practice of pronunciation and through the expansion of vocabulary. It includes an approach to phonetics.

This course provides a reflection on Teaching-Learning Theories for foreign languages and their applications in secondary education. It focuses on Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

This course presents and discusses contemporary new propaganda techniques and their applications in various political and national conditions. It introduces the basic concepts of classic propaganda, beginning with an explanation of the classic definitions, and continues with the recent studies in which propaganda is identified as non-consensual, not informed, and/or not free organized persuasive communication. The course covers the history of propaganda using the perspectives of both war and peace times, including the establishment of the influential department of the Curia in Catholic Church in 1622 (Propaganda Fide), the 20th century phenomena of fascist and communist propaganda, as well as more recent information warfare and hybrid wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Propaganda techniques are analyzed using the examples of, among others, the information-psychological operations from Russia and the American public diplomacy. Additionally, the propaganda operations that accompanied the military conflicts in Middle East and North Africa are covered. The course discusses the role of the traditional and new media, especially social media, in propaganda wars, as well as the relationship between marketing, public relations, and propaganda.

This course explores how space is navigated in the modern novel. It focuses on Kafka’s LE CHATEAU, which describes various types of places (roads, bridges, inns, walls, corridors) and disturbed perceptions of space-time, to see how literature places the modern subject in the wide world. The course considers the difference between places and spaces: physical and geographical space, private and public space, foreignness and strangeness, borders and limits, cultivated and uncultivated. It observes how a text, narrative or descriptive, constructs a space and the symbolic role it can give it.

This course develops linguistic skills to increase cultural competences for a more comprehensive understanding of the French way of life. It studies the main media of information and their credentials, the organization of information in a newspaper, the press review, and the press design. The course includes a visit to the printing house of the newspaper Sud Ouest.