Course Description
Addresses questions of power, politics, and identity in the urban environment, with a focus upon Paris. The course will only be taught in Paris as a study abroad course.
Athena Title
Paris and Modernity
Prerequisite
GEOG 1101 or INTL 1100 or INTL 1100H or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered summer semester every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course is designed to explore the issues of power, politics, and identity in the urban environment, with a focus upon Paris. The course will be broken into three parts: i) an examination of France's historical activities as a colonial power and how these shaped France's emergence as a global power; ii) an examination of how French attitudes about empire, political power, and modernity led to the rebuilding of much of Paris to make it an appropriately grand imperial capital; iii) an examination of immigration into France and Europe from former colonies and how this has resonance for thinking about national identity in France/Europe today. The class will be organized around both a lecture and a discussion component. Students will be expected to participate in discussions, prepare writing assignments, and work through the theoretical issues presented in lecture and in the readings. Students will use the city as an active learning environment, visiting various sites in Paris as appropriate. Students will learn to articulate and reflect upon the complex interaction of power, identity, and the urban environment as it relates to the development of Paris as a modern city. In so doing, they will learn to think about power and identity in a historical and geographical manner. This course meets the following General Education Abilities by accomplishing the specific learning objectives listed below: Communicate effectively through writing. This is met by students writing a term paper and/or other writing pieces which involves interpreting, analysing, assessing, and comparing and contrasting the content of written materials on related topics from multiple disciplines. Communicate effectively through speech. This is met by oral presentations, discussion leading, and classroom participation. Critical Thinking (Engaging in complex thought, analysis, and reasoning): Critical Thinking is central to the learning objectives of this class, and is developed through lecture, classroom discussion, and visiting sites in Paris. Students will be challenged to think about the connections between, on the one hand, Paris' urban environment and how it has developed over time and, on the other, the exercise of political power in a historical and geographical context. Moral Reasoning (Ethics): is an important element of this course, as it considers the ethics of the exercise of political power and conflicts between more democratic and more authoritarian forms of governance. Moral reasoning is developed through lectures, writing assignments, classroom discussion, and visiting sites in Paris.
Topical Outline
1) FRENCH COLONIALISM AS AN ELEMENT OF 18TH- AND 19TH-CENTURY GLOBALIZATION This section of the course focuses upon France as an imperial nation, the creation of the first and second empires in the 18th and 19th centuries, and efforts by France to present itself as a Muslim power during its 19th-century conquest of North and West Africa. 2) PARIS AS IMPERIAL CAPITAL AND THE VESTIGES OF EMPIRE This section explores the rebuilding of Paris, starting in the late 18th century after the French revolution and continuing into the 19th century as Paris was reimagined as a capital city fit for an empire and home to the principles of modernist rationalism. The section looks at the politics of urban planning and the aesthetics of architecture and how the use of symbols in the landscape was central to the exercise of political power. 3) THINKING ABOUT IDENTITY IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? This section looks at issues of identity and what it means to be French today in light of the history of immigration into France from the colonies (which has created a multi-cultural society) and the growing efforts of the European Union to encourage people to abandon national identities and to create post- national identities.
Syllabus