The major pillars of the programs

Within the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social Sciences, the courses are:

photo 2Question based:

Rather than focusing on the presentation of currents, privileged authors and their works, these are used to understand given questions. The teaching is therefore “interdisciplinary”, since many questions imply the joint lighting of several disciplines such as economics and sociology, as for education or health areas. For the same reasons, it closely associates fundamental and applied knowledge, inductive and deductive approaches, reflection and action, through workshops, experiments and simulations.

Method based:

The objective is to provide students with the necessary tools to deal with public policy issues as they arise today. This requires strong interdisciplinary skills. The student must learn to use a wide range of methods, both quantitative and qualitative, from the processing of big data to ethnographic observation, through the experimental method, modeling or the questionnaire, and know how to combine them in a relevant way.

Evidence based:

The emphasis is put on the strength of the arguments that allow a question to be truly answered, beyond disciplinary allegiances, current preferences or the mastery of one method over others.

Helicoïdal:

Learning is based on a conceptual spine and a “helix of conceptualization” approach. It is a matter of addressing the same question at different stages of the curriculum, according to increasingly elaborate levels of conceptualization.

View from the South:

The objective of the programs is to train visionary decision-makers capable of rethinking public policies in developing countries; to understand and anticipate geopolitical issues in Africa; to develop economic and social development models for Africa; to understand the evolutions of societies; and to open up to knowledge.

Synthetic: 

The point is to overcome certain antagonisms which frequently structure the academic world and from which the students and the public policies, are the first to suffer. These oppositions come down more or less to the distinction that Pascal made between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geometry: scientific/literary, quantitative methods/qualitative methods, hard sciences/soft sciences, sciences/humanities, fundamental/applied, etc. Rather than opposing these two “spirits”, it is necessary to offer courses that allow them to be jointly developed.

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Thus FGSES programs offer courses devoted to mathematical methods and logic, to the experimental method, to the processing of big data or even to the analysis of networks. It also offers fundamental disciplinary modules: macroeconomics, microeconomics, political institutions, law as well as courses in social psychology, political philosophy, world history and the African continent. A wide range of optional and elective courses are also offered, such as security, space and territories in Morocco, human nature, the philosophy of science or even the epidemiology of beliefs.

This variety of courses aims to form balanced profiles, capable of forging models while having a concern for realism, inclined to abstraction but with a solid sense of the concrete reality that surrounds them, concerned with application but with a taste for reflection. 

In a word, the objective is to give a technical skeleton, without which we have no seat to stand, and a reflexive flesh, without which there is no life or action that makes sense.