Political Science

This course explores the many forms of relationship between politics and visual culture. From the ancient world to the present, politics, whether formal or popular, has had a visual dimension. Politicians have been concerned to control their appearance; various media (from painting to theatre to television to the internet) have been used to both serve and defeat this goal. The course surveys the relationship between politics and visual culture and allows students to engage with contemporary issues surrounding politics, film, and digital culture.

Cities have become major actors on environmental policy. However, the crosscutting nature of environmental problems involves the city in a web of relationships with other levels of government and non-governmental actors. Therefore, the understanding of environmental policy in cities raises the need to unveil the “black box” of the different dimensions of governance (urban, metropolitan, multi-level). The aim of the course is to introduce students to the complexity of implementing public policies in urban contexts through the particular complexities of the environmental issues. For such purpose, the course addresses the basic concepts of policy analysis, the different discussions and theories on governance and orients them towards the specific case of environmental problems in different contexts. Particular attention is placed on air quality, mobility, and climate change.

This course explores the articulation between environmental attitudes and worldviews and how they contribute to shaping green political action in a context where the imminence of a global ecological crisis (global warming, threats on biodiversity, scarcity of resources) is no longer in question. The course covers a diversity of social sciences approaches: how conceptions of nature shape our attitudes to its enjoyment, understanding, and exploitation; the challenges to environmentally friendly public policies at the national, the European, and the international levels, including; the role of individuals from collective mobilization to the emergence of the “citizen-consumer”; the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary strategies of environmental movements and of the counter-movements, in the EU and beyond.

This course looks at the geography of the contemporary Arab world, including origins and consequences. Topics addressed include: the Arab world as a geographic object; Islam as a shared and at times divisive faith; ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world; recent states with complex heritages; forms and practices of power in the Arab world; from Caliphate to Nation State; the Arab world as a space of movements; from the medina to the metropolis, the tradition and modernity of the Arab city; hydrocarbons as a source of wealth and as an obstacle to development; water as a vital and coveted resource; the Arab world in the face of food-related challenges; interface or periphery, the Arab world and its margins, and between the temptation to withdraw and promises of an opening, the Arab world in the face of globalization.