Propaganda and Mass Persuasion

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course addresses the issues of propaganda and mass persuasion in the contemporary world. Propaganda, because it is a necessity for all political regimes, is indeed omnipresent both in authoritarian regimes and in democratic societies. Drawing on the achievements of several disciplines (history, communication, sociology, political science, social psychology, art history, neuroscience), this course puts into perspective the mutations of propaganda and persuasion at work since "The age of paper" to "the digital age" by relying on a wide variety of media (texts, still images, moving images, sounds, objects, monuments). It is based both on a theoretical approach, which leads to the principles of propaganda and mass persuasion through the main texts of reference, and an empirical approach, which results in the analysis of techniques and the effects of propaganda through a series of case studies. This course has a strong methodological dimension: besides a methodology of the dissertation and the presentation, it proposes methods of comprehension and critical analysis useful to apprehend, in a global perspective, the modalities and the techniques of the mass persuasion.