FR 200 - Introduction to French Culture

• Describe how historical and socio-cultural developments in France such as the Revolution and colonial occupation have affected minority and majority communities and informed competing notions of citizenship and evolving political structures and practices.
• Describe and evaluate sociocultural diversity in contemporary French culture and explain how culturally diverse experiences create value within French society; use critical thinking to explain why certain quarters of the society fail to value France’s religious and cultural diversity.
• Apply critical thinking in order to analyze the ways in which equality and inequality are institutionalized in France’s socio-political, economic, and/or organizational structures.
• Identify and describe a number of French social movements and explain the importance of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in relation to these social movements (how they inform both social justice movements and their ethnic nationalist counterparts).
• Describe and analyze local-to-global dynamics as they shape contemporary French culture within the broader context of interdependent global systems today.
• Compare and critically assess relationships between French models of citizenship to American models (compare and contrast what an informed citizen looks like in each model); and then explain in turn how these models are informed by historical, economic, cultural, economic, and political forces and processes.