FirstBridge is the hallmark of your first year at AUP. This dynamic, innovative learning experience provides a solid foundation for the rigor of future academic work at AUP and allows you to gain new knowledge and skills that you will use outside the university and beyond in your professional life. You will explore a range of interdisciplinary issues and questions, and complete individual and team projects while improving vital skills in writing, public speaking and information literacy. It will connect you with the people and resources at AUP that will help you chart a critical pathway to academic and personal success. It is both an introduction to university life at AUP and an introduction to the cosmopolitan city of Paris.
You may be arriving at AUP with a strong sense of your intellectual interests and desired educational and career path, or you may not. FirstBridge is designed to help you confirm interests and explore new ones, to go outside of your comfort zone and take risks. If you have decided on a major or minor, we encourage you to choose a FirstBridge that is outside of this field. The following descriptions will help you to decide which FirstBridge is right for you. Follow the link that accompanies each FirstBridge, read the course descriptions carefully and let them spark your curiosity.
In these times of ecological crisis, slowing down and learning how to observe non-humans may just be the key that enables us to survive. Zoos and aquariums in and around Paris allow a unique exploration of animal behavior that is otherwise extremely difficult to achieve in the wild. In this class, students will explore the unique perceptual worlds of non-human animals through hands-on scientific observation in various Parisian institutions as well as through the medium of film. Filmmaking allows a different type of attunement to ecosystems, which opens new speculative possibilities. How can we center a jellyfish, a family of flamingoes, or even an entire ecosystem in our approach to the world – both in scientific and film-based research? What is the definition of an ecosystem when it is based in a zoo, a man-made institution? Over the course of a semester, they will learn about the science of animal behavior while observing animals and create their own films about a particular species, community, or ecosystem. The course on behavior, taught by Elena Berg, will be devoted to learning about the rich evolutionary history of animal behavior, and to training the students to observe and contextualize animal behavior. Isabelle Carbonell’s companion course on environmental film and filmmaking will contextualize the use of film when studying animals, specifically films made in and around zoos and aquariums, and will help students build the skillset required to produce films and/or media of animals in Paris.
This course will explore the inner and outer worlds of animals in the contemporary world, in which humans are dramatically altering natural landscapes across the globe. We will begin by exploring the evolution and diversification of the animal kingdom. What explains the marvelous variety of behavioral and morphological traits that we can see today? Why do peacocks have such colorful tails? Why do pigeons puff up and strut around after each other in the spring? How do bees find food? Why do some animals live in groups, while others live alone? Why are there so many big mammals in Africa? We will then examine how humans fit into this family tree. When did humans evolve, why do we look and act the way we do, and how did we make our way to the top of the food chain? Finally, we will address the enormous impact that humans have had on this planet since our arrival, an epoch known as the Anthropocene. What are the major threats to biodiversity, and how can we mitigate them? Where is the wildlife in our cities, and how do animals’ lives differ in urban vs. wild environments? What role do – or should – institutions like zoos and museums play in preserving Earth’s legacy?
Capturing animals on film is as old as the medium of film itself: the world’s first bit of cinema is arguably of a horse running. Turning the lens of cinema on animals – whether felines, fishes, or microbes - and by extension on the ecosystems we live in, raises questions about the role of cinema in our understanding of nonhumans. What do these strange beings think about? How do they navigate their worlds? How do they get food, find a mate, sense danger, build a home? Are their senses the same as humans? How do different species interact in the same ecosystem? This hybrid theory-practice course will examine how cinema can explore these questions, both through the analysis of different representations of animals on the screen, as well as by making films with a focus on animals in different Parisian zoos and aquariums. As a production course, students will be trained in experimental and documentary film and sound methods specific to animal behavior and will produce creative film and sound sketches and a final film or sound project that considers how film can be used to attune to other ways of being. No prior experience in film or sound is necessary.
What does it mean to look at Paris queerly? And, what does queer Paris look like? This First Bridge pairing uses screen mediaĚýand literature to think through LGBTQ+ Paris, from the centre to the suburbs. In exploring and thinking about Paris, we will consider a broad range of cultures and contexts. We will discover key moments in the history of the queer city, learning how queer lives have been shaped, expressed, and policed, and how policing has been fought through activism and counter-culture. From Belle Époque drag balls and lesbian salons, to AIDS activism, disco, cruising, and voguing in the banlieue today, we’ll consider the porous exchange between politics, history and artistic production, asking how LGBTQ+ identities have been shaped by Paris, and how queer people have made, and continue to make, the city today. We will look at some of the methods media producers and writers use to create worlds, bringing LGBTQ+ Paris to life on the screen and the page. We will think about questions of queer space, and queer feeling, in everyday Parisian life. And, we will reflect on how queerness intersects with other experiences and identities, including race, migration, and disability.
In this course, we will explore how queer lives and cultures in Paris have been brought to the screen. We will analyse a range of examples of in film, television, and digital media, in order to question the social, political, and economic stakes of representing (or self-representing) queer experiences which challenge dominant norms, and which continue, despite some recognition, to be misconstrued and marginalised.
This course takes a look at queer journeys through Paris. Using a range of texts, we will explore how LGBTQ+ people have variously moved through the city and why this matters. We will look at different kinds of journeys – liberatory and oppressive - including migration, country to city, marching, expulsion, flânerie, cruising, dancing, as well as moving backwards through queer history, and movements for change.Ěý
This course uses food as an entry point into investigating identity formation and environmental management over space and time in the Atlantic World.
The Atlantic is a heterogenous space of different environments, peoples, and cultures between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Yet, historians and anthropologists have proposed considering the “Atlantic theater” as a research category for understanding human mobility and environmental change in a region collectively shaped by diasporas of people, plants, and pathogens since c. 1500.
The course is led by a historian (Rosengarten) and a biodiversity scientist (Caballer Gutierrez); each week of the first semester students will think about one crop, dish, or food culture that plays a prominent role in Atlantic history. We will contextualize these items both historically and ecologically as we move around the ocean.
Our weekly case studies include questions such as: what could a Viking arriving in 10th-century Iceland eat and cultivate in volcanic soils? Where can sugarcane grow, and how did sugar production move from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic to drive the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 15th century? How does the history of the peanut industry in Senegal explain Senegalese national dishes and 19th-century French imperial expansion? What are the consequences of crude oil runoff in the Niger Delta region for Nigerian populations that do not consent to ingesting it, but are nonetheless exposed to this toxicity by today’s Big Oil industries?
Food and crop histories show us how the Atlantic world of uneven geopolitical relationships was forged in modern history. At the same time, they provide insight into the present and futures of climate change and uneven environmental degradation for communities around the world. Throughout our Atlantic itinerary, we ask: do food and consumption practices mirror or obscure our historically shifting identities?
How have food, drinks, and drugs shaped the modern world economy? What empires & global social systems have risen and fallen in contests over crops, animals & the people who raise them? How do recent human mass migrations relate to the history of food & drugs? This course puts crops, stimulants, and intoxicants at the center of major global history topics since 1500. Students will gain insight into understanding and critiquing historical evidence, how to write a college-level essay in history and related social sciences, and how to undertake historical research using the resources of our globally connected library at AUP.
History cannot be understood out of it´s social, political and economic context. Actually, most historical events that required decision making can be explained by the need or the use of resources (food or any other). Science explains how natural resources influence History represents a biological approach to these historical events, consistently tackling to proof that they are not independent from their environmental context.
This course´s schedule and outline are coordinated with its counterpart course Food, Drinks, and Drugs in World History taught by Professor Rosengarten (historian) and is focused on explaining the biological reasons why the historical events portrayed in her course happened.
The course is taught twice a week in two different ways: lectures structured over audiovisual content and flipped teaching, using the student´s findings to deepen into the different lectures.
The cultures of the Middle East and North Africa are plural. Though marked by monotheism, this region, running from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Arabian Gulf in the East, is home to diverse languages and cultures, cities and landscapes. In this First Bridge, students discover the region’s societies through literature, cinema, and other materials. They also study the Middle East’s urbanism and architecture, examining cities as diverse as Mecca and Médina, Cairo and Istanbul, Fès, Tunis and Diyarbakir, along with the capsular metropolises of the Gulf emirates. With these twinned classes, students find out how several disciplines, including cultural geography, urban planning and architectural history, as well as literature and cinema, construct knowledge. Paris, city of migrants, offers us museums and neighborhoods to visit that are important to Middle Eastern diasporas. Longer trips outside Paris are planned.
David Tresilian’s CL1091 course on Modern to Contemporary in the Arab World uses literature and film to introduce students to a region which is often poorly understood by outsiders. Providing sound foundations in twentieth-century literature from a range of Arab countries, the course brings students right up to the present. What is the situation in the Arab World, ten years after the uprisings of spring 2011? What are the current debates on identity and culture in the region? Where is cultural life at its most dynamic? How is this culture seen in the students’ home countries? The study of a diverse range of texts, films, and digital materials gives students a basis on which to reflect critically on these questions and use them as a basis for a final project.
Bringing together urban planning, architectural history and political geography, course ME1091 looks at cities in Western Asia and North Africa. It provides an overview of urban settlement in the Middle East from the beginnings of Islam to the eighteenth century, before focusing on the processes of urbanization in the region from 1800 until today. After looking at the specificities of the region’s cities we explore the interaction between rapid social change, political power and professional planning. Today, uprisings fuelled by demands for social equity and democracy, major conflict driven migrations and the needs of capital all mark cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Students will reflect on issues related to the management, planning and design of extensive city regions, historic centres and poorly serviced self-built areas. Essentially, this course is an introduction to the challenges facing cities located at the critical meeting point of Africa and Eurasia.
All of us are shaped by constructs, myths and paradigms we aren’t even aware of, but that doesn’t keep them from having decisive impacts on how we live our lives and how we interact with others. Such constructs vary across and within cultures and change constantly, complicating our interactions – and sometimes making them quite contentious. There is no biological basis to the shifting category of “race,” yet our societies use it to organize and justify a range of activities and mindsets. Where does that originate and why do we continue? Brands, target markets, and even financial transactions are all equally invented concepts, but managers, organizations and customers must take them into account when making decisions: only by understanding and navigating them will their personal and organizational objectives be met. This FirstBridge will look at the concrete and the mutable from the origins of our species to contemporary practice.Ěý
In this introductory management course we will study decision making processes of all types and the supporting analysis.Ěý What communities and concepts have been created or developed by management?Ěý How do employees and customers react?Ěý How does the manager motivate or manipulate?Ěý At what point (and why) may decisions cross ethical lines?Ěý Students will perform research, analyze cases, movies, and series as well as play an active role in business simulations.Ěý
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.
We are not only a product of the environment but of our genes… as a human race, we are predisposed, with integrated traits; as individuals, those are shaped by our social and cultural contexts. This course is centered in the topic of Evolution and Gender, which will draw from the fields of statistics and science.
The math-science approach will allow us to examine the origin and evolution of gender statistics, including how the data is collected, analyzed, and presented through case studies. Gender statistics play a key role in measuring gender gaps and assessing progress towards gender equality.Ěý
The performing arts approach will serve to explore how artists question gender issues through multidisciplinary art forms. Contemporary performer artists use the art scene to deconstruct gender stereotypes and create new gender narratives interrogating us on gender evolution. We will see how the art scene develops sociological and philosophical topics.
General Contact
advising
aup.edu
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Undergraduate Students
Dominique Meys
dmeysaup.edu
Tel:Ěý+33 1 40 62 06 71
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Office: 3rd floor
Quai d'Orsay Learning Commons
6, rue du Colonel Combes
75007 Paris, France
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M,T,W,T,F: 09:00-17:00
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FirstBridge Coordinator
Raphael Bloch Laine