Sciences Po School of Political Arts

Opening sched­uled in 2010
Founded by Bruno Latour and Valérie Pihet

“This school is not about science, nor arts, nor pol­i­tics. No matter the ini­tial calling — research, pol­i­tics, the arts — the task lies in front of these dis­ci­plines, it does not belong to any of them in advance. This is why we will be able to host so many dif­ferent pro­fes­sions and pro­fes­sionals: what they already know is far less impor­tant to us than the tra­jec­tory that we will effect with them. We will not join science, art and pol­i­tics together but rather dis­semble them first and, unfa­miliar and renewed, take them up again after­wards, but dif­fer­ently.”
BRUNO LATOUR, Director of The School of Political Arts

The School of Political Arts is the first course of its kind: com­bining the social sciences, human­i­ties, and the arts broadly con­sid­ered, breaking down dis­ci­plinary bar­riers, and over­coming the arti­fi­cial divide between the arts and the sciences, between the aca­demic and the pro­fes­sional. The School is open to young pro­fes­sionals from around the world—a­ca­demics, artists, archi­tects, designers, cura­tors, jour­nal­ists, entrepreneurs, etc.—seeking to hone their skill set, advance their aca­demic exper­tise, or even actively reassess their careers.
The school’s aim is to provide artists with a high-level training in the social sciences (methods for empir­ical inquiry), and, con­versely, to con­front social sci­en­tists and public or pri­vate sector pro­fes­sionals with the qual­i­ties and method­olo­gies of the arts. These two fields will not be studied side by side; but rather will con­verge through teaching exper­i­ments and an inno­va­tive cur­riculum grounded in common objects of study. The public sphere will be taken as the focal point of this con­ver­gence.
For, indeed, the ques­tion at the heart of this pro­ject is the crisis of rep­re­sen­ta­tion (in the largest pos­sible sense). This crisis can only be over­come by asso­ci­ating three prac­tices of rep­re­sen­ta­tion that have as yet been rel­a­tively sep­a­rated: polit­ical rep­re­sen­ta­tion, sci­en­tific rep­re­set­nta­tion, and aes­thetic rep­re­sen­ta­tion.
The School’s ped­a­gog­ical pro­gram is grounded in pro­ject devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion. Participants will have to work in groups on a specific pro­ject throughout the year, with a par­tic­ular emphasis on field­work. A con­sid­er­able number of the pro­posed courses will be in direct res­o­nance with these pro­jects; the remaining teach­ings will provide core cur­ric­ular knowl­edge in keeping with the spirit of the school.

The main teaching body will be deci­sively inter­na­tional, com­posed of renowned artists, social sci­en­tists, art his­to­rians, and new media the­o­rists, etc. Their con­tri­bu­tions can take on a variety of for­mats and tempos (peri­odic or reg­ular teach­ings, from a one hour master class to an entire trimester’s course­work).

Bruno Latour, born in France in 1947, is a soci­ol­o­gist, anthro­pol­o­gist and philoso­pher of science. From 1982 to 2006, he was pro­fessor at the Centre de soci­ologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and, for var­ious periods, vis­iting pro­fessor at UCSD, the London School of Economics and Harvard University. In 2006, he was named pro­fessor at Sciences Po Paris and has since become dean of the insti­tute’s Board of Studies. Best known for his con­tri­bu­tion to the soci­ology of science, his field­work has focused on the social con­struc­tion of sci­en­tific research. His work has also ques­tioned the exclu­sive role of "social" mate­rials in the "con­struc­tion" of sci­en­tific facts, over­coming social con­struc­tivism with the broader approach of actor-net­work theory. His most well-known works are Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), and We Have Never Been Modern (1991). In 2008, Bruno Latour received the Siegfried Unseld Prize for his life­time con­tri­bu­tions to research. In 2002, he co-curated the crit­i­cally acclaimed inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tion Iconoclash, beyond the image wars in science, reli­gion and art at the ZKM Center in Karlsruhe. In 2005, he co-curated Making Things Public. The atmo­spheres of democ­racy. In 2007, he was named pres­i­dent of the Fondation de France’s Cultural Committee.