4000

The first course on methodology focuses on the current methodologies within the domain of social sciences.

In this course the students must finalize their degree project, with the support of the corresponding academic director. The two previous courses are a prerequisite for this project.

This course will study the Colombian democracy on the second half of the XX century and the beginnings of the XXI. It focuses on the approach on the configuration of Colombia´s politics over the said period, from an approach that emphasizes on an institutional perspective from the concepts and the methodology of political sciences.

The goal is to familiarize students with the comparative method that seeks to explain the political and social phenomena based on differences and similarities between cases in different regions and countries of the world. Comparative politics has privileged the search for explanations for variations between cases, for example in terms of regimes, political choices, socioeconomic results, and the interaction between these variables. It also studies the differences between social stakeholders in terms of efficacy, organizational capacity and political impact.  

This is an organized course on the central and classis topics of Political Sciences as power, the State, democracy and society. In debates on ideologies they have been largely regarded as a false consciousness or as constitutive in terms of the sense we attribute to it. Furthermore, in recent years, ideologies have evolved from being based on class-dependent actors to non classist interests as culture, gender or environment, among other. Within that framework, the purpose of this course is to contribute to raise the political criteria, by the analysis of the evolution of the main political ideologies.

This course reviews theories representing culturalistic, hermeneutic positions which are post-modern in inspiration. The objective of the seminar is to explore the limits of what constitutes one of the main debates of contemporary political theory: that posed between the autopoietic paradigm of Niklas Luhmann, heir of the liberal-positivist tradition as well as that of functionalism, and two traditions which directly or indirectly confront it: French post-structuralism, both in its own exponents as well as in the Marxist hybrid of Negri and Hardt and the Frankfurt School, especially in its second and third generations.

The purpose of the course is for students to learn more about Habermas’s political and social philosophy. This author presents a way of thinking where historical development is interpreted as a process of technical rationalization that reaches its peak in the domination of the administered society over the world of life. Habermas’s conception of society and politics is based on a critique of functionalist and instrumental reasoning and on the need to recover dialectical reason and discourse ethics.