Sciences Po Reims

This is a beginner level French language course. First semester French- A1. This course is for students who have never had the opportunity to study French. Students have no real of functional knowledge of francophone contexts. At the end of this semester-long course, students are expected to understand and use simple sentences concerning daily life, saluting, spelling, becoming familiar with pronunciation, knowing the numbers and telling time, introducing oneself or someone else, and using basic formulas of politeness. The student is able to understand simple statements, salutations, forms of address, directions, re-stated press headlines, and simplified press articles. Depending on the interlocutor and the communicative setting in situ (repetition or reformulation), the student is able to answer simple questions and know how to ask them, to speak about him or herself, his or her tastes, successfully conducting a communication event in formal and/or familiar situations (purchases, restaurants, banks, doctors' offices, post office, traveling) and make plans. The student should be able to complete a form or answer a questionnaire. He/she can compose a short postcard, email or formulate a proposal for a concrete plan. The student has a solid understanding of nouns and noun groups, nouns and determiners, and descriptive, possessive, and demonstrative adjectives. Students understand first group verbs, irregular/auxiliary verbs, etre and avoir, the semi-auxiliaries pouvoir, vouloir, faire, and devoir in addition to verb tenses such as indicative present, near future, recent past, and past perfect. An end of semester an oral and written test assess the acquisition of these skills. Students are required to take both the Fre nch lecture and the French workshop.

The goal of this course is to confront the French and English journalistic traditions. It looks at the history of the press, from the first newspapers to the digital era. From the time of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the English press has been characterized by its liberty in how it treats political power. To the contrary, the French press has built itself around a centralized system, closely controlled by the State, which has endured since the end of the Old Regime and even, in a certain sense, until the 1881 Law Of the Press. Of course globalization has eroded some of the differences between the two journalistic models. However, the course examines the enduring deep disparities, by looking at examples taken from recent history, such as the Sofitel affair in New York and the News of the World scandal.

This course analyzes how war and international relations has evolved in the face of new technologies in the twenty-first century, through the study of several over-arching themes in action in a series of case studies. Classic geopolitical power, the FIRC (Foreign Imposed Regime Changes) operations are less and less efficient to create political spaces. The course discusses the following: the failure of the military intervention in Afghanistan, the failure of the neo-conservative project of modernization by the powers in Iraq and the Middle East, tensions surrounding the military control of Tibet by China, failure of military control of the routes of global trade due to maritime pirates. These failures during the 2001-2011 decade explain the blockages in Syria (since 2011) and Ukraine (in 2014). In 2009 in Iran, then in 2011, the revolutions in the Middle East and the Arab Spring created the possibility of unblocking the geopolitics situations blocked since the 1980s. But after five years, the results of the revolutions in the Middle East have been disappointing, ambiguous, or led to a civil war. Only Tunisia has been able to put into place a new democratic space. The multiplication of players creates a new world space that is radically different. These players are not only the new BRICS states, but the entirety of new economic, political and social players: NGO, FTN, institutions, organizations, individuals. The world is becoming equally multipolar and multi-centric. The new world spaces are now everywhere: from the South China Seas to the forests of Brazil, as well as the continental plates of the Arctic. This course questions how we think about the new geopolitical conditions of war and peace in the global village in this new world situation.

This course explores different aspects of the many crises that the European Union is going through. After a brief introduction, the course analyzes current challenges to the European project: the ideal of solidarity that sustains it, the way it deals with migrants, the departure of the UK, the rise of extremist parties and the threat that these parties represent for traditional European values..

This course is to traces and contextualizes the birth and development of post-Independence sub-Saharan African cinema in the 1960s-70s. From both a historical and cinematic perspective, it examines the ways in which this key period shaped emerging filmmaking trends in Africa, foregrounding the questions of identity and representation. Alternating the viewing and analysis of a corpus of six emblematic 60s and 70s feature films, the course studies the socio-political and cultural contexts of this postcolonial cinema, its influences, themes, and aesthetics. The films studied in this course are: AFRIQUE SUR SEINE by Paulin S Vieyra (1955), BOROM SARRET by Ousmane Sembe`ne (Senegal, 1963), XALA by Ousmane Sembe`ne (Senegal, 1974), BAARA by Souleymane Cisse´ (Mali, 1977), KADDU BEYKAT (LETTRE PAYSANNE) by Safi Faye (Senegal, 1975), MUNA MOTO by Jean-Pierre Dikongue Pipa (Cameroon, 1975), TOUKI-BOUKI by Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal, 1973).

Our time is characterized by a series of changes or shifts of unheard of and poorly understood depth and promptitude. Since 1800 wealth has been multiplied by 70, world population by 7, life expectancy by 2. Individualism, mass consumption, mass education, and women's emancipation have been the landmarks of an evolution that some dubbed “the great acceleration”. Add on top of that, ever-growing technological changes and environmental degradation and you get a multi-faceted situation that this course aims to understand synthetically and holistically. The course underlines the prospective aspects and whenever possible puts emphasis on the trajectory rather than the current data points.

Political upheaval is used in the very structure of Charles Dickens's A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859) which alternates between London and Paris during the time of the French revolution. It is an opportunity to study the way the British viewed these eventful years and compare it to a post-colonial novel, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN (1981) by Salman Rushdie, whose magic realism is a response to history. The course is based on comparative studies of extracts taken from both novels and the last courses focus on movie adaptations.

This course illustrates the interaction of competition law with new technologies, innovation, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) that has triggered heated debates. In recent years, technological developments have opened the doors to more intensified competition in digital markets leading to personalized goods or services in lower prices and higher quality, while sharing economy, online platforms, and disruptive innovators create new possibilities for enormous growth. Yet international organizations, competition authorities, courts, and antitrust scholars are becoming increasingly concerned about the pitfalls and problems of digital competition. Against this background, this course considers how competition law deals with innovation. The following topics are covered: what is the relationship between competition law and IPRs; is IP law promoting innovation; should competition law be reconfigured to deal with innovation in digital economy.

Since the late eighteenth century, thousands of African Americans have travelled to Africa. The scope of African American history is revealed in the variety of those who have made the journey, from manumitted slaves to poets and Peace Corps volunteers. Over the years, black travelers have found their way to every corner of the continent. Focusing mostly on twentieth century African American travelers to Africa, the course studies their journeys and the ways in which Africa was seen in many different ways: a “dark continent” crying out for civilization, a headquarters for anticolonial revolution, a field of opportunities for entrepreneurs, most often a clue to the meaning of their own history. The purpose of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the global importance of Africa.