Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course focuses on sociological concepts and methods through the lens of the city. It applies sociological concepts to the city that can be seen while walking around, such as the city of buildings and people; and those less noticeable, such as the city of sentiments, conflict, traffic flows, bike messengers, sewage networks, asset prices and municipal taxation, and animals and nature. This course uses key sociological readings, case studies, and topics in the news to study the city as a complex space where buildings, people, animals, laws, policies, and international financial flows intersect to produce our lived experience. It focuses on close reading of texts, understanding the key argument of each text, and applying concepts to the real world; and covers the key strategies and skills of academic writing as students produce a research paper based on a city of their choice. The first part of the course explores foundational texts, while the rest of the course addresses specific questions related to housing markets, social policy, violence, drugs, environmental change, segregation, urban infrastructure, and urban regulations.
 

This course addresses the call for the provincialization of Europe and the West, the decolonization of science, and the indigenization of national or regional social sciences. It covers the history of sociology from the mid-19th century onwards, including new insights into the hidden development of Southern sociology and a more critical vision about how the canonization at play in sociology still excludes minorities, women, and Southern sociologists.

From the patriotic tunes of the inter-war mandatory period to the underground music of the Arab Uprisings, Middle Eastern and North African popular music is deeply entangled with politics. Since the late nineteenth century, states and various social groups have attempted to channel the power of patriotic hymns and subversive songs. This course draws on the sociology and anthropology of culture to revisit the history of the region through music. It looks beyond periods of political upheaval to understand the everyday significance of musical practices in authoritarian, neoliberal, and postcolonial settings. Whether we understand it as a tightly knit web of meaning or as a soundwave that travels around and beyond the Middle East, popular music – its production, circulation, and consumption— tells a larger story about the making and remaking of identities and power relations in modern nation-states in the region.

This course focuses on the reading of classical texts in political theory and philosophy. It confronts foundational texts in the Western tradition (Plato, Hobbes, Tocqueville, Marx, Arendt, Foucault) to improve reading skills, better understand the history of political ideas, and develop views on current political events. The course provides an opportunity to practice the use of precise concepts and to develop stronger argumentations.

The course provides an introduction to comparative public policy analysis used in political science and administrative studies. It develops theoretical and methodological skills for students interested in public policy analysis. The course provides the necessary tools for understanding and conducting in-depth research on a variety of political issues. Each class is divided into two parts. The first part of the lecture deals with the main concepts in public policy analysis. The second part applies those concepts to a specific policy related to urban issues through a presentation by the students followed by either a group work or a debate in class. Learning outcomes include understanding and criticizing comparative analytical frameworks; investigating policy processes, outputs, and outcomes across various policy areas; conducting their own research on a specific policy domain following a comparative perspective. The course is structured so that the learning experience in class sessions is cumulative. Students are expected to read all assigned readings, regularly attend, and contribute to the class, and develop their own comparative analysis of one policy in the United States or Canada and in a European country.