Columbia in Paris

This class is offered in partnership with the Nouveau Collège d'Études Politiques (NCEP). Students will follow two seminars with NCEP professors and students. Please note that the first seminar will be held at Reid Hall and the second seminar at NCEP's campus in Aubervilliers.

While offered in partnership with the Columbia in Paris program, this is a local university course and fulfills the local university enrollment requirement for those students concerned.

Political Rhetoric (Les mots de la politique), Wednesday, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm, January 14 - February 25 ONLY, Reid Hall

This seminar will demonstrate how any history of political thought and any theoretical reflection on politics are inseparable from a history of political terminology. Three of the main critical approaches related to this perspective (history of concepts, discourse analysis, linguistic contextualization) will be presented. The issues of language plurality, translation, the language of the state, and freedom of speech will also be addressed in detail.

In this presentation, it is important to understand that there is no theory without history (which requires acquiring a certain amount of knowledge about the history of political language and accumulating significant examples) and that there is no history without the ability to analyze, using theoretical tools and concepts, the issues and questions that emerge at particular moments (to simplify, we can say that understanding these issues means understanding what matters most and what produces something different, something new).

Politics of Fiction (Politique de la fiction), Wednesday, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm, March 25 - May 13 ONLY, Campus de Condorcet - NCEP (Aubervilliers)

This seminar explores how theater and performance artists use the specific tools of their art to examine the most pressing social issues of our time.

Through the analysis of contemporary theatrical practices—from documentary and autofictional theater to allegorical forms, from staged readings to interventions in public spaces—we will examine how theatrical fiction becomes a political instrument. How do artists work with collective memory? What theatrical devices can be used to challenge the discourse of power and dominant media representations? How does the stage create heterotopias, those other spaces where power relations can be reversed and the “art of the weak” exercised?

The course will pay particular attention to contexts of censorship and exile, where theater develops strategies for circumvention and invents new forms of public speech. We will draw on examples from contemporary Russian-language dramaturgy and European performance practices, among others.