Firstbridge

This course will explore how language defines humanity; particularly our ability to transmit knowledge and govern ourselves collectively through politics. We will examine and discuss the important role language plays in society, epistemology, and democracy as well as how they are interrelated. We will use the works of philosophers and theorists along with class discussions to begin to grasp these ideas and apply them to the current political crises of political polarization, “Fake News”, and democracy in order to better understand these crises and how we can begin to address them. Students will leave this course with a deeper practical understanding of contemporary politics, democracy, epistemology, and language, including how they might begin to meaningfully communicate across the political and epistemological divisions rending apart societies and nations.

This course equips students with the tools to explore the underlying universality of all human languages while celebrating the distinctive features that render their own languages unique and, at times, challenging to learn. Through an array of immersive activities and thought-provoking discussions, students will hone their ability to conquer language acquisition challenges. By the end of the course, they will not only have a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity but also possess the skills necessary to effectively teach their language to classmates, children, or adults while studying in Paris. Whether you're passionate about language acquisition or teaching, this course offers a dynamic platform for exploring the intricacies of human communication and the art of language pedagogy.

In 1898, the famous French painter Paul Gauguin finished a large canvas entitled Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?. Influenced by Polynesian culture, to the point that he settled in Tahiti and the Marquise Islands for the last decade of his life, Gauguin was preoccupied with finding a visual equivalent to some fundamental questions: what are the origins of humanity, what is the goal of our existence, what is our place in the universe, what happens to us after we die, what will remain behind us? In his attempt to answer these questions, the artist confronted diverse religious references, from Adam and Eve to pagan totems and Buddha, as well as diverse artistic traditions, from his native Western to Polynesian and Japanese. Gauguin’s work was not an exception; at the end of the 19th century, with the progressive recognition of prehistoric art and non-Western art and cultures, artists embraced essential ethic, scientific, philosophical interrogations revising their own beliefs and stereotypes. 

This course will explore how important questions such as what makes us human and why we are here are reflected in or expressed through visual representation. We will go back to prehistoric art and what it tells us about our ancestors, the first humans; we’ll look at representations of the creation of the world and of humans in different cultures (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Christian medieval in Western Europe, Polynesian); we’ll see how artworks reveal social attitudes towards the “other,” people of different cultures and color, from the Renaissance to Gauguin; finally, we’ll look at how art was used by the Nazis to answer these big questions through simplified images of the purity of the race suggesting the possible rebirth of a pure race and eventually justifying genocide.

Given that there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, why are some societies so obsessed with separating people into groups and referring to differences between groups as “racial”? Humans have always identified some people as “Us” and everybody else as “Other,” but the “scientific” discourse of race dates from the 19th century. After examining what science can say about the origins and evolution of our species, students will look at how racialized discourse came into use, how it came to justify slavery and imperialism, how it gave rise to eugenics, and how it can culminate in the ultimate denial of the kinship of humanity, genocide.