Sciences Po Reims

Great speeches echo through history. Good speeches can win an election. Regular speeches are glorified shopping lists. The difference between them is a subtle alchemy of message, medium, context, and audience. By analyzing some of history's greatest speeches, this class tries to make sense of political speeches both through the literary and medium approaches. Words are the main political means. There is no politics without speech. But how these words are perceived is also influenced by the medium used. Taking into account Regis Debray's “médiologie” and Marshall McLuhan's works, this class also considers the impact of media evolution in the making of political speeches. By focusing on political speeches though their themes, context, and media, this class touches on political rhetoric, media training, and public speaking coaching.

This course explores concepts of social control, inequality, and social change from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The features and comparative advantages and disadvantages of major systems of social control are examined, including social groups, markets, and legal systems. The course also explores concepts of social inequality, seeking to understand how various social control dynamics contribute to the creation, reinforcement, and preservation of privilege and disadvantage focusing on racial and gender inequality. Using case studies, the course examines how social movements have pursued various strategies to drive social change to reduce racial or gender inequality.

This course is about economic dimensions of current challenges facing the European Union (EU). The world economy is rapidly changing: the 2007-2008 financial crisis has had deep and lasting consequences on the functioning of the euro area; Brexit and new forms of unilateralism in the USA are challenging the EU traditional stance; multinational corporations and technical change are questioning the EU and European governments' capacity to regulate and to tax; ecological crises are threatening citizens' health and the future of mankind on earth. The course selects a number of issues that appear salient in current debates about the EU, its relationship with the rest of the world, and its future. It mobilizes the economist's analytical tool box to shed light on policy decision-making and pending issues.

Elections are a key component of democracies. They play a central role in the process of political representation, by allowing citizens to choose their representatives and to hold them accountable. Participants in this course become familiar with the main theories of electoral behavior, party strategies, and political representation, and they learn about the recent debates in this field of research. This course gives much importance to the comparative approach of elections and representation. Students learn how institutions, party system characteristics, and other contextual factors influence and constrain the behavior of citizens and parties, as well as the nature and quality of political representation.

The course covers the following topics: the functioning of data mining tools and their contributions to managerial and research professions; dynamic search tools on the open web and on the dark web; the proper tools to use according to the objectives sought; the latest trends and innovations in Business and Social Analytics; opportunities offered in terms of data mining by artificial intelligence and IoT.

In the end of the course the student is able to: understand the goals and applications of decision making theories; understand the current evolution of decision making science; develop skills in experimental economics and management; use the proper tools according to the objectives sought; master the latest trends in sciences of decision; analyze the opportunities offered by science of decision in management, economics, and sociology. The following topics are covered: introduction to decision making, from Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility to Dempster-Shafer theory; cross-cultural differences in decision-making theory; alternative logics from C.S. Peirce to J.P. Burgess; dealing with uncertainties; Game Theory, Nash equilibria, mixed-strategies as randomization and backwards induction, signaling and incomplete information, repeated games, evolutionary stable strategies; the death of Homo Oeconomicus, from rational to irrational cognitive biases, from selfish to caring, altruism and the warm-glow effect, from perfect to limited cognition, bounded rationality and rational inattention; neuroeconomics, the animal side of human decision making.

From the first stage of rapid urban growth in the Northeast to the current rise of post-industrial cities in the West and South, this course focuses on the character and history of major American cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Woven into their unique histories are key elements of the United States' political, social, cultural and economic history. Using texts, maps, movies, music, the course explores the rich history of urban America from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first century.

State-centric approaches to International Relations, both as a scholarly discipline and an actual setting of world politics, have been challenged by the emergence of non-state actors increasingly in an age of globalization. This course discusses roles, functions, survival, and mobilization strategies as well as limitations of a diverse range of economic, social, legal (and illegal), old and new actors, such as transnational corporations, human rights movements, ethno-national movements, diasporas, religious actors, popular uprisings, guerrilla groups, organized crime, social media, and individuals. Hence, this course employs an interdisciplinary approach benefiting from conceptual and methodological tools of international relations, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Various forms of interactions among these actors and their engagement in world politics can be better understood by shedding light on key concepts and phenomena including transnationalism, migration, diaspora, global activism, and deterritorialization that usually imply identity politics through non-state, sub-state, or supra-state loyalties. Special emphasis is put on diasporas and their mobilization through transnationalization of political activity. Students of this course have the opportunity to investigate a particular non-state actor that they choose to look at closely for their final essay. In doing so, they question multiple meanings of state and non-state, the boundaries of these two spheres in conflicting, cooperating, and overlapping social/political contexts. Hence, the course attempts to have a balance between theoretical works and case studies. In addition to formal readings of the course, the students are encouraged to reflect on their own life experiences.