Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This workshop for advanced level students (C1 and C2) offers a framework, space, and means to approach creative writing in French. In a relaxed environment, the workshop provides an opportunity to discover authors in touch with the current world, express sensitivity, and exchange ideas about French literature, particularly contemporary literature. The workshop consists of exploring various authors and genres to find one’s personal style and voice in French; story writing; cinematographic, theatrical, radio, and poetic writing. Linguistically, students develop the ability to characterize, in writing, the multiple descriptions (places, characters, emotions) contained in their productions; orally contextualize and justify the choices made in their writing; question texts and authors with delicacy and subtlety; and express feelings. The workshop provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s relationship to writing (pleasure, anxiety, necessity) as well as one’s relationship to writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue (frustrations, freedom of expression).

This course is structured in two parts, theoretical and practical, and examines the diverging ontological, epistemological, and political frameworks to resolve the biosphere crisis to the human habitability of planet Earth. The first part of the course compares post-dualist approaches (advocating the abandonment of the society-nature distinction) with the theories that recognize a heuristic and epistemological value of the society-nature dualism. The second part of the course maps the range of policies, ideologies, and collective actions in response to the climate disaster: from neo-Malthusian eco-fascism defending a nationalist rootedness in the territory; to the liberal eco-modernism of green growth; as well as the socialist project of a Green New Deal and the agroecological peasant movement, La Via Campesina.

The course provides the latest methodological and theoretical tools for understanding the politics of urbanization and urbanism. The course takes the politics of urbanism as a transdisciplinary arena. It encourages thinking across disciplinary boundaries to address the environmental and social challenges of the present. The question of how cities act politically on the global scale is widely discussed and receives diverse answers from researchers. The course suggests that the study of the political agency shall be grounded in urban studies and empirically tested on different layers of policymaking, allowing for hybrid combinations. An urban studies approach addresses the spatial and temporal specificity of urban processes, in contrast with the "methodological nationalism" of large parts of the social sciences. It focuses critically on spatialized social processes and socio-material assemblages, combinations of objects and agencies that affect how cities are organized and, to some extent, governed.

This course studies U.S. foreign policy from within. It examines how policy is made: by whom, under what constraints, and to what ends. U.S. foreign policy making is shaped both by American political culture and the peculiarities of American democracy. Conversely, the imperatives of statecraft can strain democratic principles. Over the term, the course traces how this tension has evolved and how it is managed (or not). The topic is approached through the lens of truth and publicity: What do U.S. leaders keep from the public? Why? Does secrecy pay off and at what cost to democratic accountability? One pedagogical component is a role-play simulation in which students collectively reconstruct a U.S. presidential election around a foreign policy issue.

This course provides an introductory primer to the field of international law. It then navigates through a series of case studies exemplifying the subversion of legal conflicts by mass media, including Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and even climate change. Finally, it tests the limits of this approach by considering the involvement of social media as an emerging Fifth Estate.

This course offers an introduction to contemporary transformations in poverty and institutional responses in France and Europe. It traces the history of French social protection and the main European models and addresses the challenges of defining and quantifying poverty, as well as the associated conceptual debates. The central sessions deal with non-take-up, the effects of public policies on attitudes (policy feedbacks), and stigmatization. Finally, it explores the transformations of minimum social benefits, the restructuring of solidarity policies, and lived experiences of poverty. Readings and group work enable students to develop tools for analyzing social protection systems and current poverty dynamics.