Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course is an introduction to the history of epidemics from the Neolithic period to neoliberal twenty-first century. It adopts an original angle: the perspective of planetary health, a recently emerged framework that proposes to address the interplay between health and disease, local environments, and the planetary crisis. The course engages simultaneously with the history of medicine (including the legacies of Hippocratic and medieval theories of epidemics), with global history (trade, war, colonialism, international governance), and with environmental history (emergence of pathogens, ecological transformation, multi-species histories, Anthropocene studies). Exploring examples including cholera, plague, Covid-19, and HIV-AIDS, it explores how epidemics are embedded within wider pathogenic ecologies shaped by political structures, planetary change, and human (in)action and ignorance. To do so, it follows a “place-based” approached, which avoids the repetitive and sometimes stereotypical genre of epidemic narratives. Focus is also placed on greater Paris as a region marked by the experience of epidemics and epidemic control.

This course uses a literary approach to political themes founded on the reflective and aesthetic values of certain works. This approach is supplemented by a philosophical, moral, and political reading of the works from an internal and external viewpoint which place them in their historical context and measure their weight outside of that context. This course develops a reflection on the political fable genre. After a general introduction (overview of Rabelais, Boccalini, Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Huxley), the course centers on a formal, structural, and moral analysis of two famous collections of fables which use a philosophical and ironical approach: the 12 books of La Fontaine's fables and the 33 chapters of Tchouang-tseu as an art on the variation. In these different philosophical, satirical, didactic fables, the course studies the following double dimensions: political/moral, lucidity/illusion, wisdom/folly, animal/human, direct allusion/indirect allusion, and irony/humor. The art of the variation is defined in the different arts and contexts.

This course covers China's relationships with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian countries. The discussion does not include India and the rest of the South Asian countries. The course infers the principles of China's move and behavior toward Afghanistan and the South-Central Asian countries, historically and during Xi's era, and analyzes the effects on the South-Central Asian region and trans-regionally. Additional topics include China's geo-economic and security ambitions in South-Central Asia, counter-terrorism, and a broader picture of the World Order.

This course covers Africa's current international relations and provides a historical outlook on relations and connections between African societies or states and the world from the first Pan-African conference in 1900 until the end of the Cold War. Drawing on the global history approach, the course goes beyond the traditional imperial history that tends to focus exclusively on Euro-African exchanges and demonstrates how Africa became entwined with world politics, interacted with diversified actors across the world (in Asia, Middle East and Latin America), and tried to shape global affairs. The first part of the course focuses on Great Divergence and Atlantic revolutions to contextualize European colonial conquests. The second part considers the history of African resistance and struggles, anti-colonial and post-colonial solidarities across the world, Panafricanism(s), and African integration. The third part of the course addresses divergent paths of decolonization, Africa's role in the Third world setting, the role of technology, and the Cold War rivalries. More generally, this course combines the transnational, cultural, and diplomatic history of Africa. Each session consists of two parts: a short introduction by the seminar leader and academic discussion around required readings to analyze primary sources and documentaries.

This course is a study of the history of Israel as seen through films. The course examines various angles of the socio-political reality displayed in both fiction and documentary films. From the early twentieth century in Palestine and onwards in Israel, mainly through Israeli cinema, a flourishing industry nowadays, as well as through foreign cinema, the course covers the main events that shaped and continue to shape the reality of this young state: the historical events that led to its foundation, the wars which drew its borders, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its multi-cultural identity.

This course introduces the theoretical and methodological approaches of Disability Studies, an expanding field that is not yet well enough known in France. It is organized in twelve themed sessions focusing on conceptual models used in studying disability, the history of legislative and social policy for impaired persons, and representations of disability in literature, the arts, and new media. The course offers a particularly worthwhile addition to the skillset of students preparing for careers in law, public administration, education, or social work.