University of Bordeaux

This course explores the various concepts, dynamics, debates, and challenges of cultural globalization. Most chapters start with a review of key writings and concepts that describe the process of globalization through a cultural lens. Guided by this understanding of culture, it questions the notion of globalization as largely the product of Western culture, modernity, and capitalism resulting in a worldwide, homogenized, consumer culture – a scenario often referred to as “McDonaldization.” The course focuses on diverse case studies to explore and discuss that possibility and also take into account emergent issues in relation to cultural globalization in the world we live in right now.

This course strengthens linguistic, cultural, and analytical skills through a focus on the economic and social realities of the United States and the United Kingdom. It develops the ability to understand, process, and critically interpret major economic concepts and historical contexts. The course emphasizes effective listening, note-taking, and building disciplinary vocabulary, and engages with essential notions in economics, social history, and contemporary societal issues.

This course explores the difference between the language of literature and the language of general communication. The course examines these topics by conducting close textual analyses on 19th- and 20th-century literary samples of poetry, novels, and theater.

This course examines concepts of justice and injustice as they apply to the social, spatial, and environmental realms—and to the intersections between them. It offers a critical exploration of the origins of these notions, the contributions of key thinkers, and the ways in which ideas of justice have circulated, been debated, and been mobilized across academic, social, and political spheres. The course focuses on applying these analytical frameworks to a range of spaces, including metropolitan areas, peripheral territories, and natural (protected) environments, in both the Global North and the Global South. From a methodological perspective, the course introduces students to actor-based analysis, critical source evaluation, and the processes of translating concepts and debates between Anglophone and Francophone academic and activist contexts.

This course offers a historical perspective on the development of the European Union and its close associates yet not formally members of the Union. The EU is usually approached and studied as an administrative and legal construct. In this lecture series by contrast, the emergence and
development of this singular polity is examined in the variety of its manifestations: economic as well as political and cultural.