Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course contextualizes digital data to understand its benefits and limitations, particularly with generalizability. Students learn how inequality, institutions, and ideology may influence the transformation of the media, as well as Big Data (and small). The inequality segment examines class, gender, and race intersectionalities in digital data production and impact, such as online harassment. Corporate and civic institutions also influence digital data, so the course unpacks institutional effects, from Facebook to the State. Finally, political ideology shapes how data is created and seen, so political campaigns and movements are analyzed to understand how they produce and distribute digital data. The course interrogates the broader role of technology in society and ties current cases with long-standing sociological debates, methods, and theories.

This is a beginner level French language course for students with no prior French language background. It focuses on understanding and using simple sentences concerning daily life, saluting, spelling, pronunciation, numbers and telling time, introducing oneself or someone else, directions, press headlines and simple articles, and using basic formulas of politeness. It builds skills to ask and answer simple questions, express preferences, and make plans in settings such as stores, restaurants, banks, doctors' offices, the post office, and while traveling. The course covers nouns and noun groups, nouns and determiners, and descriptive, possessive, and demonstrative adjectives. It also introduces first group verbs, irregular and auxiliary verbs, semi-auxiliary verbs, as well as verb tenses such as indicative present, near future, recent past, and past perfect. 

Combining political sociology, political thought, and international relations, this course focuses on certain aspects of modern political conflicts and particularly the institutions put into place to resolve them. It explores the difficulties that social sciences have when looking at the question of political violence and its causes, as well as the mechanisms of liberal and democratic regulation of conflict. The course also analyzes the modern international interventions after a violent political conflict, the dilemma of the actual intervention, the evolution of the rapport with political violence, and the formation of expertise post-conflict.

This course provides the basic knowledge and analytical tools to understand the major issues at stake in climate and environmental diplomacy, as well as the dynamics of international policy-making on climate and the environment, the interplay of actors, and the possibilities and limits of existing systems. Sessions are organized by theme and highlight the cross-cutting nature of these issues and their interactions with numerous fields of international relations. This introductory approach considers a broad panorama of international actors, issues, and frameworks.

The sea and oceans are becoming topics of significant importance on the global security agenda and as an innovative field of research for social sciences although “Sea Studies” can be seen as an area of research “in the making”. This course sets out to introduce key issues of pertinence in Maritime Security and geopolitics of the Sea. It demonstrates why the maritime domain is a space of great strategic interest, and how threats to security at sea have a real impact for states and people around the world. It explores a myriad of threats to security playing out at sea, while also looking at some of the mechanisms, tools, strategies and key-actors involved in addressing these challenges. Each session provides an overview of the issue it discusses and considers regional case studies as an illustration. This approach adopts a multidisciplinary perspective with interrelated considerations coming from very various fields of research (political science, international relations, social anthropology, political economy, international law, history) but also lessons learned coming from practitioners, as well as policymakers enabling students to develop a comprehensive and better-informed understanding of debates and developments related to maritime security issues.

Occupying a favorable position in a network can be seen as a strategic asset. This course is interested in understanding how rational individuals behave when they position themselves in networks or interact through a given network. These issues are analyzed in the microeconomic/game theoretical framework of utility maximizing agents. Tools for modeling, describing, and analyzing networks are introduced and criteria for identifying the most central, well-connected, or influential agents in the network are reviewed. The problem of strategic network formation is explored in different contexts and the stability and efficiency of the networks that are formed are analyzed. Finally, the course is interested in how network architecture can influence different social processes such as the spread of an innovation or a trend in a population or the adoption of socially desirable or undesirable behaviors.

This introductory course to political science offers an overview of the discipline, without presenting a history of the discipline. It covers the main subjects dealt with, the different approaches to them, and the methods and tools needed to understand them. The course develops knowledge, analytical skills, and critical abilities with regard to contemporary political phenomena, by clarifying the central concepts and controversies. It adopts a pluralistic and comparative perspective, and makes room for both classical and contemporary works and objects. The complementary module explores the major themes presented, with a regional focus on Europe, and a particular interest in the construction of Europe. It examines the European project as a political challenge, looking at how it operates, its space, and the debate surrounding its legitimacy, before looking at the production of public action at supranational level, and concluding with perspectives on its impact, public opinion, and the transformation of European societies.

This course applies a gender perspective to different sociological objects and illustrates how this perspective can enrich our analysis of society. The course covers how sociology has integrated gender (or not) in the analysis of the family, education, labor markets, or politics. This is a general sociology course that addresses some of the key questions that interest sociologists while systematically applying a gender perspective to these questions. It also studies gender as a social category, discusses how it is produced and reproduced in society, and how it relates to social inequalities. This course provides a new perspective on some of the topics covered in introductory sociology classes, and it covers also some additional ones. Some previous background in sociology is recommended, but not required to follow the course.