Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course examines the relationship with history using a perpetual round-trip between modern times and its challenges. Modern representations are based on numerous Greek and Roman categories, but the terms "democracy" and "republic,” and the historical relationship with the body, sexuality, religion, and the environment, have been used with various means to an end, depending on immediate news or justification of interests with certain groups. Historical figures have thus become hostages in a world looking for landmarks. Using historical documents (texts, images, films, series) and contemporary sources, this course begins with current problems (the pandemic, democracy in crisis, the refugee issue, the #Metoo movement) to examine their supposed relationship with the antique world, before moving towards a critical reading of the habits we now have that existed during ancient times.

This is an advanced course considering the economic forces that govern the geographic distribution of economic activity and its implications for economic outcomes and public policy issues. The course is divided in two parts. The first part develops a simple theory of cities as the result of the interaction between agglomeration and congestion forces. It proceeds to study in detail the agglomeration forces that attract firms, consumers, and workers to cities, as well as the congestion forces that limit the size of cities and how to overcome them through transportation networks and housing markets. The second part of the course extends the basic model to study a system of many locations, the dynamics of city growth and decline, and to conclude, the role of cities and geography for climate change.

This course studies the signs and causes of party democracy crisis and the changing political conflict brought on by multilevel governance, globalization, and manifestations of political apathy, among other phenomena, which defy the way contemporary democracies work. Considering how the terms of the political conflict in Western democracies are changing significantly due to economic, cultural, and political transformations, the course analyzes the transformation of the political conflict and the attitudinal change behind it; the changing party systems and the rise of new challenger, populist, and radical right parties; changes in the patterns of political behavior; globalization, the increase in inequality, and the political consequences of both; the increase in polarization; the crisis of parties and party government and occurrences of democratic backsliding.

This course explores the major questions raised by the ambition of today's literature to render justice, as well as the risks of public and even legal contestation to which it is exposed. By browsing works that have given rise to a public debate, scandal, or even lawsuit, and exposing the terms of the controversy and its stakes (the difference between fiction and testimony, the rights of the characters in the face of romantic or family settling of accounts, the limits of the representable, the debates on cultural appropriation, the traumatic risks of reading, the search for transgression, new forms of censorship, etc.), this course introduces contemporary literature in its liveliest and most political form. It also returns to major societal issues (the rise of populism, social crises, the Me Too affair, contemporary family recompositions, debates on postcolonialism, racialism, etc.) from an original angle: that of the story of fiction.