Guy Spielmann, Georgetown University (Washington, DC / USA)

"My experience teaching a class at Sciences Po Lille was a double discovery, since I knew very little about the institution and I had never been to Lille—all of which I found highly motivating since I love the challenge of having to adapt to new circumstances. In fact, not much adaptation was needed, as the setting is very similar to a university in the United States, especially since I was teaching in English. In this case, the nature of the class, "Politics as Spectacle from Alcibiades to Donald Trump,” was such that I had to redefine common terms ("performance," "spectacle," "event"), so that it would not have been completely different if the students had all been native speakers of English. The biggest surprise for me, then, was that about half of the students hailed from outside of France, many of them from outside of Europe.

As I see it, the main advantage of bringing a guest professor from another country and another educational system is to expose students to different approaches, and also to sources that are not readily accessible. This is why I put on my syllabus some classic works that students might already know (Orwell's 1984) but also articles and book excerpts that have not been translated and that are very difficult to access outside of the U.S. My goal was not only to increase the students' knowledge about "Politics as Spectacle," but also to change their vision by demonstrating that much of politics is necessarily a form of spectacle—based on a definition of spectacle as a neutral phenomenon that does not imply fiction, illusion, fakery or excess.

One particularly interesting aspect of the course was the choice of topics for the case study that I assigned: because of their national and cultural diversity, students decided to work on a great variety of topics ranging from famous political speeches (by JFK, Gandhi, Obama, Chavez) to other events like protests against fur or the WTO, a North Korean military parade, the Paris Gay Pride or the staging of Che Guevara's death by Bolivian authorities. This amazing range of material was enriching for the whole class, and for me as well, even though I have been working on this for nearly a decade. This defines a perfect teaching experience for me: when I, too, get to learn something!"