Teacher in charge of the course : Alexandre Mallard
This course is aimed at first-year students in the Civil Engineering program at École des Mines. Designed as an introduction to the social sciences, the course aims to equip students with a basic knowledge of analytical and methodological approaches to understanding the major issues facing society today: socioeconomic power relations, phenomena of belief, social and cultural differentiation, issues of justice, public problems and the place of science in society. The scope of the problems covered includes current environmental issues related to the ecological crisis. These issues are assumed to constitute a central dimension of contemporary stakes, at the heart of sociopolitical transformations that a public of engineers must be able to address. Lectures present a range of sociological, historical, anthropological, political science and STS contributions on these issues. Students are also required to read and discuss social science books, enabling them to explore the perspective of the course on a range of historical and contemporary case studies, and to show how these approaches are applied to empirical research and specific fieldwork: social integration, social conflict, gender relations, the construction of democratic institutions, the history of opinion polling, scientific controversies, energy policy, the transformation of our relationship with animals, the geopolitics of climate, and so on.