Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course integrates a gender perspective in the studies of societies and politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It deploys an interdisciplinary approach and provides a gendered understanding of key issues and concepts such as nation and citizenship, family/kinship, social movements and civil society, violence and conflict. The course is based on two methods: (1) a theoretical framework setting the basis for gender studies in the MENA region; (2) an analysis of case studies and topical issues in order to understand the place of women and gender in the transformations of societies and political regimes in the MENA region.

This course introduces the sociological analysis of gender. It utilizes a gender perspective to systematically apply a gender lens to key topics in sociology. The first part of the course covers basic theoretical dimensions of gender, including the nature versus nurture debate, intersectionality, and various sociological perspectives on gender. The second part of the course examines social institutions (family, the educational system, the workplace, health) with a focus on gender inequalities and gender norms. 

From interpersonal violence to political violence, from sex crimes to organized crime, from the family sphere to the public arena, from “news stories” to historical trials, criminal justice reveals our societies, their obsessions, the norms and values that underpin them and evolve over time. Society protects itself by criminalizing deviance and transgression, and in the courtroom, the repulsive figures of this deviance are forged and assigned to the dock. In contemporary France, the legitimacy and symbolic force of the sanction, in terms of the law but also under the weight of representations, social expectations and media focus, are the subject of constant questioning, as the emergence of the victim figure tends to redefine the balance of penal interactions.

This course teaches the fundamentals of econometrics, in particular regression analysis and statistical inference. It purposefully starts at a level that assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, econometrics, or programming. The course does not rely on advanced math, rather it uses practical learning to understand and interpret simple and multiple linear regressions and detect whether an analysis uncovers correlations or causality. The course teaches the use of R, a very powerful and widely used programming language, to perform data cleaning and undertake statistical analyses. Students carry out a small-scale research project using real-world data and regression analysis to reveal associations between various variables.

This course develops tools for analyzing the effect of social networks, the way that culture constrains and enables economic outcomes, and the effect that systems of power have the reproduction of economic inequalities. These tools are the foundation on which economic sociology seeks to explain, criticize, influence, and predict economic action. The first part of the course establishes three primary intellectual camps or “theories” of economic action: power, culture, and rational action. The second part of the course applies these theoretical approaches to address a series of contemporary economic questions and concerns.

This course provides an introduction to the statistical and econometric theory underlying surveys and counterfactual policy evaluations. Doing so, it sharpens critical appraisal of the very many surveys and policy evaluations found in public discourse, as data-driven evaluations of public policies are becoming commonly used to help societies choose how to organize unemployment insurance, the provisions of health care and education, etc. This course uses mathematical notation and proofs and engages with mathematically formalized material.

This course studies Robert Dahl's DEMOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS, a modern classic of democratic theory, to develop the ability to think about democracy in a critical and informed way. It considers how the concepts presented in the work frame issues facing contemporary democracy. Through deep reading, the course provides an opportunity to understand every aspect of and engage in a dialogue with this modern classic to discover its full richness.