Sociology

This course offers an historical analysis of social and political ideas from classical antiquity to the present. Topics include: the legacy of Greece and Rome; the Christian vision of political society; humanism and renaissance; the reformation; scientific revolution; enlightenment; Rousseau; the American and French revolutions; French liberalism; Tocqueville; socialism; fascism; the social, political, and ideological crisis of the 20th century.

This course discusses social and political conflicts in contemporary history. It examines the repertoires of collective mobilization and revolutionary processes.

This course presents the main characteristics of the French school system, with a focus on elementary school. It includes a theoretical part and an application part, through the participation of students in an introduction to their native language and culture for elementary school pupils. The topics presented in the theoretical part include: organization of the French school system (in a comparative perspective); focus on a French characteristic: nursery school; inclusive education and the schooling of children with disabilities; the case of allophone pupils and openness to other languages at school. This course provides insights of the French school system and prepares exchange students to speak in front of primary school pupils as part of a multicultural team. Students reflect on aspects of their native culture and language that it would be relevant to share with the pupils.

What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? This course looks at how everyday views or framings of inequality emerge. The course examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, and how inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change. The course explores people’s sense of inequality’ through their attitudes and perceptions, reflexive and self-conscious values and beliefs, expressions of injustice and indignity, struggles against inequality through organized protest, resistance and mundane non-compliance, but also through the more tacit, embodied, and affective ways in which people know and sense the world.