Political Science

This course is transdisciplinary in its framing and combines various approaches and scholarship from critical security studies, surveillance studies, sociology of technology, data sciences, human rights, and international law. The course develops a reflexive understanding of the main categories at work when using geopolitics, security and securitization, mass surveillance, and privacy rights, by joining different experiences too often fragmented by disciplinary knowledge. It analyzes the scripts they produce in order to build a transdisciplinary understanding reflecting the debates (or lack thereof) concerning digital spaces.

This course explores the concepts of nation and identity in modern France via its cultural, political, and intellectual history. It examines key ideas developed by some of the most influential modern French thinkers. Each week students consider a handful of central ideas, contained in short slogans or quotations, which is then developed more fully in accompanying texts. Students discuss the ideas developed in these texts, relating them to broader course questions and to their own experience in contemporary Paris.

This course explores the history of the United States from the end of World War I to the present day. It is made up of four thematic sections which focus on: the state and political development; gender and sexuality; the US and the world; and race and ethnicity. Throughout, students focus on historiographical questions that occupy scholars and interrogate change and continuity in political and social ideology during the 20th and 21st centuries. As the course progresses students develop a keen understanding of the interconnected nature of these overarching themes in American life and use this to assess particular events or thematic issues in their broader context. By the end of the course, students have a solid factual understanding of the United States since 1920, a critical understanding of the historical processes that have shaped the country over the past hundred years, and the ability to construct more nuanced analyses of the US past and present.

Border officials shoot, detain, deport, and/or deny essential services to millions of migrants annually. In this course, students consider when states have a right to control who enters and remains in their territory, and what rights individuals have to migrate.