Empathy,indiscipline and employability: A research essay on the bilingual Masters programme ‘Cultural Intelligence and Innovation’ at Université de Paris

Who we are and how we began

The 2-year Masters programme ‘Cultural Intelligence and Innovation’ (Intelligence et innovation culturelles, shortened to MIIC) opened in September 2012 at Université de Paris. It was conceived jointly between the Faculty of Anglophone Studies (Etudes Anglophones), where linguistics, literature, history and visual arts are studied in English, and the Faculty of French and Comparative Literature, specializing in literature, arts and cinema. As well as state funding, it has had small extra donations from private companies and public organizations as part of the educational tax scheme or taxe d’apprentissage. In March 2019, it was listed as an official work-linked programme and as a result has been given more substantial joint state and private funding. Today, our alumni are in permanent and semi-permanent positions in organizations such as the Centre Pompidou; the United Nations; the OECD; Publicis; TBWA®, The Disruption® Company (part of the Omnicom Group); LVMH; Ogilvy; trend agencies including NellyRodi™ and Peclers; the Breakthrough Innovation Group of Pernod Ricard; media service providers or subscription-based streaming services Ipsos; Brain Value (surveys and strategic planning); Médiamétrie; Mad&Women (an advertising agency specialized in intersectionality and diversity); and a variety of non-governmental organizations, festivals and charities. Our graduates work as strategic planners, brand managers, brand strategists, trend forecasters, marketing and lifestyle project managers, project leads, community managers, copywriters, account managers, futures and trend specialists, trend-watchers in cultural foresight teams, web content writers, survey and data collectors and media specialists. Their jobs are changing all the time as is the Masters programme, which tries to respond to societal and technological change. They may be creating partnerships for large groups and brands, co-branding, specializing in gender-neutral messages or promoting health and a balanced lifestyle (sport and reading and concentration). Some are Influencers on Instagram, working in press agencies for culture and art, as gender experts in strategic planning and communication or as future insight consultants. Others are in publishing and journalism or work for cooperatives such as Plateau Urbain, a Paris platform and cooperative for the use of empty spaces and disused buildings (eco-districts and emergency housing). Many of our former students now teach courses to the new students.

The MIIC programme recruits 20 humanities students per year (so that there are 40 in total over the 2-year programme) from France, Europe and internationally. The majority are French and have studied English, modern languages and literature at Université de Paris; others are from French art and design schools, such as ICART. We have also welcomed humanities students from countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Vietnam, China, Tunisia, Algeria, the United States, Georgia, Russia, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. Non-European students come to us through Campus France, the state platform that encourages foreign students to apply to French courses and deals with equivalences in terms of diplomas and grades.

Our aim is to develop skills in semiology; visual, textual and cultural theory; cultural analysis; creative and commercial writing; graphic and web design; notions of sentiment analysis and search engine optimization (SEO); project management including business plans; communication; strategic planning; and brand management. The MIIC is bilingual (French and English) and puts great emphasis on excellent oral and written skills in the two languages. It also encourages the acquisition or maintenance of a third or fourth language. It is keen to promote diversity not only in terms of nation, ethnic group and culture but also in terms of socio-economic group; the programme allows for the development of certain soft skills over its 2-year duration. Socially and culturally diverse classes are livelier and create challenge and discovery. Fees are low in comparison with those in other countries as part of a French tradition of accessible education. There are numerous learning hours: 187 in the first year and 343 in the second.

Rationale and inception

With the massive explosion of information technology, of social media in the early 2000s and an evergrowing need for content, it seemed timely for French universities to start thinking about professionalizing some of their Masters programmes. In doing so, they were also responding to a 2008 Ministry of Higher Education directive asking for a boost in the number of explicitly professionalizing university programmes. Université de Paris (then Université Paris Diderot, before the 2019 merger with Université Paris Descartes) responded by setting up several such Masters programmes in more technical and scientific areas such as information technology and physics (nanotechnology), while responses from humanities departments at that time were scant. The Anglophone Studies faculty already boasted a Masters in professional literary translation, as did the faculty of applied modern languages Études Interculturelles de Langues Appliquées/ Intercultural studies in Applied Languages (EILA), yet there was no programme providing a culturally informed and humanities-based response to the needs of industry. This was partly due to a distrust of industry and the world of the economy in humanities faculties in France, which saw relations outside the academy (apart from links with cultural institutions such as museums and galleries) as a form of fraternizing and even selling-out to the world of production and profit. This same distrust (today much less powerful) was part of the reason it took 4 years to get the MIIC programme accepted, since each school and faculty had to vote favourably within its different committees before it could be officially approved. A 50-page dossier describing the programme’s structure, aims and objectives then had to be ratified at Ministry level.

Interestingly, the programme was finally conceived across two faculties created in the wake of the 1968 student revolution: the Faculty of French and Comparative Literature was once directed by philosopher Julia Kristeva, and the Faculty of Anglophone Studies was created in 1970 and was first directed by the linguist Antoine Culioli. The team that conceived and constructed the current MIIC programme some 40 years later in 2009 included a professor of classics, a professor of cinema studies (both in the French Studies faculty), a professor of 19th-century English literature and a professor of British modernism and 20th-century British Literature and Art. ¹ In 2013, the French and Comparative Literature faculty decided that it might be easier for the Anglophone Studies faculty to take full responsibility for the programme; the bilingualism of our teachers, our research on global movements and our cultural studies approach made this an obvious choice. Teachers from the other faculty, especially of literary and cultural theory and cinema, remain with us.

How we differ from other courses

The MIIC emerged from and is driven by a humanities faculty. In many ways, it was simply building on an already diverse and rich programme of studies which included literature, history, translation, linguistics, creative writing and cinema studies, and whose graduates from the ‘Licence’ (Bachelor of Arts) or the Masters programme either went on to secondary school teaching, joined the doctoral school or obtained jobs in a variety of business and cultural environments after several years of further study and training in other institutions to gain the necessary professional skills and experience. The MIIC wanted to provide a clearer and more efficient route for those students not wishing to go into teaching or academia but who had made the choice to study humanities. The programme has at its heart skills related to global cultural analysis, which are the preserve of the humanities as opposed to business schools like L'École des hautes études commerciales de Paris/Paris School of Higher Business studies (HEC) or L'École supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales/School of Economics and Business (ESSEC) or even Sciences Po which often call in arts and humanities teachers to provide a culturally based supplement or service. In this respect, we wanted to create a programme that would counter the idea that the humanities in universities are some sort of service provider for the serious disciplines such as hard sciences, economics, political science or management, considered more vocational. Modern languages departments are particularly vulnerable in this respect. In France, where researchers in the hard sciences must learn English and write papers in English as part of career survival, departments of Anglophone Studies can sometimes be unconsciously equated with the centralized language services known as LANSAD (Langues pour spécialistes d’autres disciplines/Languages for specialists of other disciplines), designed to help all students and researchers to write and speak foreign languages. The MIIC was also a response to the age-old question ‘What use are the humanities?’ and part of a desire to show that employability outside education is not the preserve of other disciplines.

We also wished to distinguish ourselves from communication and marketing courses, feeling that we had certain advantages. Cultural knowledge and understanding are at the heart of the programme, along with the analytical skills needed to read the effect of globalization on culture. Cultural innovation depends on a finely tuned appreciation, which we help our students to acquire, of a variety of medial forms – from the literary text or artwork to the meme or Instagram post. The programme is designed to show students that professional skills are not separate from humanities and that the humanities already constitute a skill: among other things they are vital in analysing the technologies and software used in the professional world which can become objects of study and cultural analysis (the aesthetic and political implications of Excel and Word, for example, or the platforms and cloud-based tools used every day in industry).

Another difference is the emphasis we place on the importance of working across cultures by using two languages and encouraging a third. Classes take place in French or English, which for some of the students constitute two foreign languages. Masters in ‘Information-Communication’ exist all over France; often excellent, these courses are rarely taught in any other language than French and are based less on core humanities subjects than on the professional skills needed for careers in communications and marketing. ² Aside from the values inherent in a multilingual approach, the preparation of students for a job market in which English is used daily and often as the lingua franca in European-based businesses seemed important to us. Many of our students have Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese as a third language (in some cases these are mother tongues). The MIIC is closer, if anything, to the French–German–Luxembourg Masters programme ‘Border Studies’ with its specialization in culture, literature and language and intercultural communication, taught in English, French and German across four universities of the Grande Région (the Universities of Lorraine, Luxembourg, Saarlandes and Kaiserslautern). ³

The MIIC was founded on the desire to experiment with teaching forms and to allow creative as well as methodological practice in the classroom. The intention was to get the best of both worlds: the rigour and breadth of French education, combined with more discursive Anglo-Saxon approaches of inclusiveness in the classroom. But the single most important element was the centrality of the humanities as a basis for both sense (as in good sense and sensing the world) and sensibility (sensitive understanding of others). The MIIC has allowed us to bring together the rigour and diversity of the French system with its multidisciplinary Baccalaureate (with philosophy, mathematics and French literature as core subjects) with a tradition of debate and the centrality of liberal arts.

Imagination and identification

Why ‘cultural intelligence and innovation’? Intelligence is both a soft skill (emotional intelligence and collective intelligence) and a hard skill (how to gather and organize information as in ‘economic intelligence’). If innovation relies on techniques of gathering and transforming information, it also needs empathetic and interdisciplinary team practices. Knowing about culture is one thing but producing cultural content is another, and it relies on techniques of sharing and pooling resources. In their Call for Papers for this special issue of Industry and Higher Education, the editors pointed out that the soft skill set is based on empathy and sensibility, ⁴ and they asked the following vital question: ‘How [can] the humanities be used in business and other non-humanities education, and in workplace settings, to respond to what is certain to be an ever-increasing need for emotionally and socially literate, creative graduates?’ This form of literacy, in which altruism and open-mindedness play their part, helps students to bring about open innovation (see Formica and Curley, 2018). Students of literature, painting, sculpture, music, film, photography and design are already primed in their ability to imagine and to receive a skill base that will lead to innovative change. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith shows that the ability to perform a leap of ‘imagination’ is what is needed to allow us to adopt the sufferings of others and for empathy to take place. ⁵ Studying the arts and the humanities fosters the imagination: ⁶ literature is capable of bringing about an opening of the mind and an embrace of different perspectives, as well as an acceptance of what seems strange in the motivations of others. ⁷ Morson and Schapiro make the following observation:

When you read a great novel and identify with its characters, you spend hundreds of hours engaging with them, feeling from within what it is like to be someone else. You see the world from the perspective of someone of a different social class, gender, religion, culture, sexuality, moral understanding, or countless other factors that differentiate people and human experience. And as characters interact, and you identify with each in turn, you see how each perspective may look to those with another. (Morson and Schapiro, 2017: 12).

Multilingualism and faint frequencies

Linguistic agility is in part the result of the bilingual aspect of the programme and, as noted earlier, students are encouraged to maintain or begin a third language. As part of their writing classes, the students practise translating between cultures and translating from one language into another – many have already engaged in such activity during their undergraduate studies. This multicultural perspective and the emphasis on multilingualism emerge from a belief that having only one language limits perspectives. This is especially important in today’s world, where opportunities to study foreign languages are being reduced – in the United Kingdom, France and in many other countries. Certain languages spoken at home (be they regional, North African, sub-Saharan or Asian) are often under-valorized by society. Closing off alternative paths of speech, thought and understanding is a real danger and one that is exacerbated by practices of tailor-made Internet feed designed to give users more of the material they have already sought. This self-feeding on homogeneous cultural and political content endlessly recycled is one of the aspects of modern life that the MIIC programme tries to combat by imagining culture and language as pluralities.

Another important aim in working with literature, art and culture in several languages is to allow the detection of the ‘faint frequencies’ in society, not simply to be able to predict and detect trends but to see what structures and habits are disappearing, perhaps struggling to survive, and what new voices are emerging. This is part of an ethic of sustainability that interests itself in the survival of the minor and the marginal. An important reference here is Georges Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies (Didi-Huberman, 2018), first published in French in 2009, which deals with faint frequencies and the importance of strange or small entities and cultures as opposed to the bright beam of mainstream culture and politics. These subtle frequencies are an enduring focus of many of the classes in which we work with students to help them see and understand how the small and local can be at the same time sustainable, viable and workable. A small community within a large organization may help that larger entity to function better since the ability to detect and signal the existence and worth of small initiatives, allowing them to grow, is a vital form of regeneration for any organization. From the survival of a start-up to that of a village in the developing world, the potential worth of a project needs to be visible to our students where others may be blind to it and pass it by.

Being attuned to those in search of help and support is not the preserve of charities, but can be the focus of many forms of entrepreneurship and social innovation. The construction of business plans is part of the curriculum, but it is made clear from the start that they need to be sustainable and carefully planned out. As Didi-Huberman (2018) has shown, fireflies or glow-worms have only disappeared from the sight of those who are not standing in the right place; we must learn to reposition ourselves. Such skills are taught in a core module on project management, as well as in other modules on emerging markets, trends and futures. We also find fireflies in a class on financial models (and their failure), in another on new models of curation in a global world and in classes that study the way literature or a television series transmits important messages from the loopholes in history ⁹ (Bernard, 2018: 78). Didi-Huberman’s book is concerned mainly with the reading of images, be they fixed, moving, high art or advertising. If correctly read and made visible through analysis, ‘firefly-images’, or images-lucioles in the original French version of the book, can open a space of resistance, operate change or form a counterculture. Students learn that it is perhaps within these hidden spaces that innovation lies.

Critique and counter-thinking

Critical thinking is also fostered by healthy doses of literary and cultural theory, part of the philosophical thinking within our programme. One favourite focus is on how to think outside the box and across disciplinary borders by using a square. The Semiotic Square (one of the best-known theoretical propositions from the Paris School of Semiotics, which had Algirdas Julien Greimas as its central figure) is used in classes on applied semiology, brand design and global culture. ¹⁰ This conceptual network in the form of a square is the visual representation of the structure of an opposition and a means of refining oppositional analyses by increasing the number of possible oppositions from two (for instance, love/hate) to four (e.g. love, hate, love and hate, and neither love nor hate) to eight or even ten. An empty semiotic square has four possibilities: on either side a positive deixis and a negative deixis and on the top a complex term while below is the negative term. This configuration allows the consideration of Term A versus Term not-A and Term B versus Term not-B. This basic unit of thinking is encouraged in the MIIC: always consider a phenomenon in terms of what it is not and then in terms of what it could be. The Semiotic Square can be used to analyse and interpret many different objects, such as brands, corporate language, fairy tales, political speeches, advertising and poetry. It is one of the tools used to question mainstream thinking and to deconstruct clichés and stereotypes, taking nothing at face value and always pushing analysis further. Much of the teaching is designed to give students an ability to map concepts and ideas and to analyse the belief systems they encounter and thus become aware of the extraordinary complexity and potential of what seem to be static or age-old terms.

Another class on techniques of expression focuses on political knowledge (democracy, autocracy, anocracy, totalitarianism, the basics of capital and the notions of use value and exchange value). These concepts are useful today in reading and understanding consumerism as well as the functioning of visual and textual propaganda. Students look at both aesthetics and politics and try to reposition concepts and rethink the binaries of global politics with the help of semiotic analysis. The students from South America will bring certain insights to the graphic art of totalitarian posters of the 1930s, for example, that are quite different from those of European students. A student from Vietnam will also react differently. The international aspect of the class helps develop this ability to see complexities and possibilities in semiotic readings.

There are numerous concepts and theories which can give the students an edge when they go for an interview and which are then usable in the professional world. An important aspect of the programme is the analysis of culture using a theoretical toolbox based on what we call the ‘three Bs’: Barthes, Baudrillard and Bourdieu. This is more than simply a ‘French touch’: it provides a grounding in some of the seminal philosophical texts used by marketers and academics alike in France and across the world. Grounding in critical semiology is given through old favourites such as Mythologies (Barthes, 1993 [1957]) and Eléments de semiology (Barthes, 1967 [1964]), while a look at some passages from La chambre claire (Barthes, 1982 [1980]), with its focus on the studium and the punctum, never fails to be of interest and use to students. Baudrillard is useful in his socio-semiological phase in Système des objets (Baudrillard, 2005 [1968]), which allows the students to understand the link between exchange value and the circulation of commodities as signs rather than objects of use value, as indeed does his La Société de consommation (Baudrillard, 1998 [1970]). Here Baudrillard argues that consumption is a specific ‘work’ and a totalizing practice (even totalitarian) and that even leisure uses time according to a principle of maximum profitability. ¹¹ The postface of Système des objets defines consumption as an endless totalizing idealist practice or pratique idéaliste totale at odds with the economic theories that seek to understand production and consumption solely in terms of supply and demand and an economic rationale. Bourdieu’s La Distinction (Bourdieu, 2010 [1979]) still helps students see the way in which taste and cultural appreciation are dictated by questions of class and hegemony and allows them to look critically at their own cultural practices and how they themselves contribute to the attributions of value and ranking that inform our societies. ¹²

Other heavyweights include Michel Foucault and his Surveiller et punir (Foucault, 1979 [1975]) for questions of (self)-surveillance systems in society, Freud on the uncanny and on dreams, and some basic phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty’s Le visible et l’invisible (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 [1964]) and his comments on Kant’s 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’. He proposes that modernity is not so much a historical period as an attitude, which we must constantly regenerate via critical rigour and a constant effort to produce the self as a subject, and thus take on a responsibility for the world. Today, this argument has interesting ecological and ethical resonance involving, as it does, the need for agency rather than slavish obedience to orthodoxy.

In terms of modernity and hypermodernity, Georg Simmel’s 1903 work on cities and their effect on the human psyche is studied (Simmel, 1950), ¹³ as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), Hartmut Rosa’s work in the 2000s on acceleration and alienation (see e.g. Rosa and Scheuerman, 2008), Marc Augé's work on space, John Urry's on mobility and Bernard Stiegler’s (2016) work on disruption. The philosophy of innovation as a motor for modern culture is addressed in Boris Groys’s 1992 work Über Das Neue (On the New – Groys, 2014). ¹⁴ On the economy of attention, a vital area for today’s economy, we have Georg Frank, Jonathan Crary as well as the classics of media analysis such as McLuhan and Kittler. Gender issues are covered by looking at key concepts in Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and Sam Bourcier, while Didi-Huberman provides insights into the image as both a critique and an embodiment of culture. Students touch on Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) Carnal Thoughts for the way we physically inhabit cinematic and electronic space and Laura Marks’s (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media for the bodily aspect of digital media. ¹⁵

Many classes engage with our fast-evolving visual culture and with the very broad range of visual practices, from traditional cinema-going to Instagramming. Familiarity with the variety of visual languages is key to an informed understanding of how our visual culture is evolving: on the same day people might have the collective experience of ‘going out’ to see Black Panther and the both intimate and collective experiences of selfies and Youtubing. Here again, classes will rely both on an empirical analysis of the students’ own take on visual culture and the input of theory, especially from the field of visual studies.

This non-exhaustive list of classes is, of course, the result of subjective choices on the part of teachers, aided year by year by input from students. The latter tell us that they are well-served by their modules in the jobs and work placements in which they find themselves.

Thinking culture and industry together

The Université de Paris – a pluridisciplinary research university – has historically been associated with disruption – first during its turbulent roots in the student revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the university was known as Paris 7; ¹⁶ then as Paris Diderot on the new campus further down the Seine in the 13th arrondissement from 2006 (in the immediate vicinity of the new site of the French National Library, Bibliothèque François Mitterrand). On the new campus, the university was designed to be part of the economic and social fabric, a university within the city. The site was once an industrial flour mill, a factory of sorts, which ground the grain and then loaded the flour onto barges on the Seine. Thus industry and learning came together both symbolically and geographically – a university in a former mill, an ideal site for bringing together all disciplines and faculties to work productively together. ¹⁷ So, if at first indiscipline existed in the form of political counterculture and militancy, this then became an interdisciplinary culture that worked against the silo effect of specialization. The MIIC programme is now a part of the broaching, and perhaps breaching, of the barriers between the academic world and industry.

In setting up the MIIC, inspiration was drawn from the ‘Doctoriales’, a sort of ‘Doctoral Commons’ organized in Paris by several cooperating universities, with interdisciplinary teams of PhD students working to make innovative products or services. It was a new way of making research meet the socio-economic world: 60 students from both sciences and humanities attended week-long residential seminars to work in interdisciplinary teams to make sustainable and ethical products or services. The outcomes were judged by a mixed academic and industrial panel which selected certain teams for financial support to develop the products. This way of working across borders and in teams provided a means of opening humanities and science students to other disciplines. In the MIIC, we aim to show students how a co-mingling of domains is vital to produce new ways of thinking and producing. As with the Doctoral Commons, students needed to play an active role to truly cross borders and think outside the frame of institutions and disciplines.

To set this way of thinking in motion, the MIIC began a series of events that were in some ways ongoing think tanks. The annual conference ‘Cultureindustry’ marked the first years of the programme and was conceived by the teaching team and students as a way of putting it on the map within the university and also of developing contacts with business and industry. More importantly, the conference tested the title of the programme by mixing culture with industry to produce collective intelligence, innovation and change. These annual events were organized by the students and were open to the public. They allowed researchers and professionals from various sectors of industry to work through different questions together. It constituted a space to think with others in collective intelligence, using pluri-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The name ‘Cultureindustry’ registered and also played with Theodor Adorno’s negative acceptation of the term. ¹⁸ We chose the name to evoke the contestation of the Frankfurt school but also to rethink it: culture mixed with industry need not be negative but could be renewed to represent positive energy and an opportunity for design thinking. Putting thought, design and awareness into the solving of societal problems or the conception of products were gestures we felt were important to the programme.

Our first conference in 2014 was organized around a series of questions on current world issues chosen by groups of MIIC students in classes dedicated to the conception of the conference. One panel was given the title ‘Are nature and the human at the centre of robotics?’ and dealt with the striving towards the human, the curious, the imperfect in robot design. The panel included AI industrialists and researchers in neurocybernetics and robotics, as well as linguists specialized in language acquisition. Another panel was concerned with ‘New museum practices and spaces’ and the new museum object and questions of dematerialization, with a curator from the MIT Museum and a consultant from the Louvre Abu Dhabi. New media and short formats were another subject, as was how the consumption of film and television had radically shifted over the last 5 years: ‘What do we watch today and how is this changing the world?’ brought together professors of cinema, adaptation and film miniaturization with directors of entertainment from media groups and streaming sites. A panel on video games, ‘Is there choice in gaming?’, including art historians, video game companies, curators of video game exhibits and a scriptwriter for Ubisoft, Blizzard and Dontnod, worked on ideological and commercial implications for users and producers. ¹⁹ A second conference in 2015 on the subject of ‘Connected Bodies’ looked at the way bodies are connected to the world and to each other today. ²⁰ The third conference in 2016 addressed the question of scale and the meeting of the Miniature and the Gigantic in collaboration with the Paris museum of art, design and technology, Le Musée des Arts et Métiers. Subjects included the 18th-century world of tie-on pockets and their link to nanotechnologies and quantum devices, but also pocket war photography and the huge effect of tiny images. ²¹ The fourth and last conference in 2017 was on the theme of locking and unlocking in our increasingly chartered world, be it in terms of education and culture, locked social and geographical borders, locking out in terms of race, gender or age, or art as a form of aesthetic and social unlocking. ²² ‘Cultureindustry’ has since ceased to be an annual event, but it has been absorbed into the daily lifeblood of the programme.

Hybrid content

The conferences were an important way of giving the Masters programme airtime and visibility and helped build a strong portfolio of contacts in the research world and in industry. The events also gave us an idea of who was out there beyond the university, thinking like us or thinking differently, and how an exchange of practices and ideas might work as part of our teaching process. Perhaps, the most important aspect was the effect that these high-profile and public moments had on our practices within the university community and on the way we started to create courses and choose both academics and professionals to teach them. In many respects, we learned to inhabit ‘the wide-open white space between disciplines – the antidisciplinary space’ (see Ito, 2014).

The experience of working with a variety of disciplines and professions allowed us to recruit professional and academic teachers who would complement each other and work to produce hybrid knowledge and practices for the students. In the first year of the 2-year programme, students attend classes in applied semiology in which they gain knowledge of brand design and understand the way brands function. The classes are delivered by a brand design professional who works in tandem with more formal classes in which images (advertising, art and photography) are analysed using the theories mentioned earlier, including the Semiotic Square. Classes on techniques of expression include both creative writing and visual expression from a graphic design professional. The teachers co-conceive the content, make bridges between their practices and, for example, transform writing done in one class into a graphic piece in another. Sometimes the latter will be hand drawn or a paper collage, but it can also be done using digital graphic tools.

Classes on communication and its history provide an understanding of how communications have changed over time. These are taught by a media historian alongside classes given by a professional who introduces the students to communications strategies and campaigns.

A module on basic project management taught by a professional who works for Deloitte concentrates on the stages of the creation, timeline, finance, budget and the personal skills needed to carry through a project, but also insists on the importance of having one’s own ideas and personal projects to bring to a company or an organization. This class is then followed up in the second term by practical classes given by two project managers from different commercial sectors (both former MIIC students, one from a large group and the other from a smaller agency so that the students get a feel for the different angles of approach). A third practical class in museum project management is given by a former director of the Louvre’s auditorium and part of the team that opened the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, who shares the class with a researcher in art and curatorial practice.

The techniques of expression or creative writing begun in the first term are followed up in the second term with more targeted forms of writing, such as writing for the communications sector, be it the world of finance and banking (an alumnus now working for a large French banking group gives this class) or of culture (taught by an academic). Another class addresses writing for particular industries, such as new technologies, festivals and museums, and literary and cultural writing; this class has obvious synergies with a module on ‘Culture and its economy’ which addresses the main activities and new actors in museums and art galleries and is taught jointly by a former student now working at the Pompidou Centre and a researcher and teacher of art history and the art world.

The second semester carries on the work on brand design from the first semester with practical classes in creating and developing future brands and on how to advise clients and project a brand into a new market. These classes are taught by an alumnus who is a brand consultant in a small but thriving agency in Paris in tandem with a researcher on globalized culture.

In the second year, the synergies between academic and professional courses are continued and reinforced in classes that are no longer weekly but planned in 10-12 intensive weeks. The rest of the time the students are working in a variety of placements. The basic subjects covered in the first year are refined to focus on particular métiers designed to give students a feel for the variety of industries open to them and to allow them to hone their skills. A class on copywriting for different new media is given by a young advertiser working for Publicis, while audiovisual culture in general (short forms and emerging formats) is treated in classes ranging from the culture of adaptation and the serial given by an academic, to understanding the business incubator and accelerator programmes designed to create new media content. Consumer behaviours in terms of the watching of series, films and programmes are studied in classes designed by teachers working for companies such as Médiamétrie. ²³

Understanding and analysing globalized culture, and the effects of globalization on the culture and aesthetics we perceive around us, are the focus of a key module taught by an academic. This class is twinned with another on cultural foresight and the consumer, in which new modes of globalized consumption or leisure (such as new forms of conviviality) are detected and then exploited by the students. Techniques of expression continue in the form of writing classes on topics related to some of these themes. Globalized consumption is mirrored and picked up in a separate module on ‘writing the decolonial’ and on gender and race questions in general which need their own finely tuned analytical and practical skills. Writing about people and community is the focus of a class given by an anthropologist and ethnologist, while journalistic formats from web and print journalism are covered by a young journalist and alumnus. All writing classes are divided equally between French and English.

A class on new models of curation, picking up on the module on museums and art galleries, looks at new globalized models in festivals and foundations and is taught by two curators of festivals and exhibitions. A module on future insights looks at the world of trends and is taught by a professional from a trend agency in Paris. A new class on platform thinking from business to cities looks at the meaning, importance and development of platforms and tools for creating them in an increasingly platform-oriented world. Students study the sites we use every day and which change our relations to the world: manufacturing has partly been replaced by collaborating on platforms which facilitate an exchange of values, information and services. The students look at platform business models, cooperativism and organization through well-known platforms such as Airbnb, Uber or Youtube and also alternative lesser known and often sustainable and ethical platforms. They learn how to create a platform that corresponds to their own aims, how to design it and draw up a roadmap (tasks, priorities, deadlines) and make a 1-minute pitch to describe it. The basics of design are learned as well as design process. ²⁴ Empathy plays a central role in ‘User eXperience’ (UX), helping students to better understand the needs of users and engendering a willingness to accept other cultural practices in design process. Last but not least, we have initiated a class on SEO and sentiment analysis, in which a young CEO of an SEO start-up works with a professor of linguistics specializing in linguistic data mining to show students the possibility of writing in a certain way to maximize visibility, referencing and emotional impact. They also work on the detection of sentiment and how this is carried out. The class imparts practical skills in data analysis, writing and production.

Each student can undertake two internships or stages and is encouraged to go abroad for at least one of them. In the second year, students are encouraged to find a job placement through the Alternance vocational training scheme with the help of FormaSup, one of the leading vocational programme platforms in Paris. Internships abroad are often co-financed by the University’s International Relations Office. The contacts from the MIIC Alumni group are precious in terms of finding internships as is the contact with their professional teachers who are often on the lookout for good interns from within their classes. Nearly all of our teachers from industry have at some point taken students as interns, or indeed hired them.

Choosing teachers

Selecting teachers has been an interesting process. It has been done in a fairly instinctive manner over the years, although when we look back certain patterns do emerge. The first criterion is the ability to work across research and industry borders and to accept both the constraints and freedoms on either side. Academics are sometimes used to more formal styles of classroom interaction (lectures and seminars followed by individual productions on the part of the students). They now needed to combine informational lecture-type starts to the class with discursive and interactional moments as in a seminar, following these with workshop-style activities or ateliers with students in groups working to a particular remit. At the end of the class (often a format of 3 h) or at the end of several classes, there will be a deliverable in the form of a pitch or a written piece or a PowerPoint presentation (either to be shown or handed in as a pdf document).

There is no one type of teacher that works better than any other in such conditions, and sometimes the quietest and most formal teachers work well and discover their qualities. A learning world in which browsing on a variety of screens and interaction with fellow classmates is the norm can be surprising in an institutional scape which has traditionally been used to 2-h formal lectures given to 300 or more students in amphitheatres or lecture theatres ²⁵ rather than seminar formats. In French universities, even the TD (travaux dirigés) may have 30 or more students per class, although this is now changing. Using mobile phones and laptops in class for research sometimes means floating attention and this, of course, can be a problem. Teachers must accept the breaking up of the traditional classroom, allowing interruption and exchange while engineering moments of concentration: both professional and academic teachers sometimes have to ask the students to close screens and ‘be here now’.

The professional teachers from outside the academic institution also have to change certain habits and adapt. Although some have taught classes in business schools, those schools are often private and so for some this is their first time in a large public institution where they have to learn to accept the constraints of university procedures and certain pedagogical rules. The public sector also pays teachers less in comparison with private schools but this, interestingly, has never been a problem: the payments are modest and slow but also sure, and teaching in a well-known public university brings with it the kudos and experience which many young (and older) professionals seek. The slowness of change in a large institution is seen as a challenge and the fact that the students are humanities majors is very attractive. Professionals find the students lively, knowledgeable, creative and able to bring cultural insight to business and institutional problems. The students are often described as sympathique (pleasant or friendly) to teach. There is a certain amount of basic coaching necessary to help teachers from outside academia develop pedagogical skills and to show them how to grade work and give feedback. This is done during a yearly teaching workshop and by email and phone as necessary. ²⁶

Choosing students

An average of 110 students have applied per year over the past 3 years for 20 places. We select them less in terms of their grades (although these have to be reasonable) than for an ability to move out of their comfort zone and, more importantly, to move towards others. An ability to talk about their experiences at work is important to show that they have noticed how systems operate and how users of goods or services are interpellated. Signs of an ability to empathize and to embrace team work are appreciated, although this does not rule out shy personalities who sometimes need a welcoming and lively group to bring them out of their shells. We try to bring together a group in which contrasts and personality differences will generate both diversity and cohesion. We favour inclusiveness on all fronts to allow everyone in the group to see that their world vantage point is not the only one. We respect mixité sociale, which we feel is important and productive to the group. Part of the meaning of creating a cohesive group is to foster a sense of belonging – what the French Grandes Ecoles call a promotion and the Americans a ‘year’. This is less common in French universities, where a sense of belonging is more difficult to create because of the numbers of students – although alumni associations are now increasingly common.

We attempt in our selection procedures to counterbalance the French selective system, which functions according to mathematical and Cartesian standards (adding up points and favouring students with a hard science background). But we are also able to feed on the excellence of the French Baccalaureate system, in which there are philosophy and literature even for science-based students, and so there is a familiarity with wielding and understanding concepts. Students who already have some ability to step into others’ shoes, and see and feel other perspectives, are of course likely to interview well and be apt to thrive in the hybrid teaching environment of the programme. There is a need for openness on our part, however – what we look for is one thing and what we encounter is another. Risk-taking is a part of the process: taking a chance with an unusual candidate can bring its own problems but has nearly always paid off.

Collective working

Perhaps, the single most important gesture we teach students is how to work with others – in groups – as a creative team. The interaction with fellow students is upheld as a basic skill and the way sustainable concepts and narratives are born. Being generous and fair, being polite, punctual and tolerant, being respectful of community rules are both Republican (in the French sense of collective values) and old-fashioned (what in France might be called the values of the troisième république and in the UK ‘Victorian’). Empathy is at the heart of the process. John Edmondson has brought out just this lesson in empathy in his reading of Graham Greene’s The Third Man and the shifting perspectives the novel allows us to see:

[…] the closer one gets [to other people], the harder it becomes to remain disengaged. Graduates with low levels of empathy may not turn out to be cold-blooded killers like Greene’s Harry Lime, but they are unlikely to work well with other people, will tend to over-prioritize their own interests and will lack the sympathetic understanding that leads to effective creativity and appropriate innovation. (Edmondson, 2020: 66)

The notion of collective work and understanding is not confined to course content but ideally expands to the whole functioning of the programme and the relations between staff – whether administrative or teaching – and students. To make sure we understood the workings of collective intelligence, we asked a group which advises on and implements organizational change in large groups such as Orange to come and work with students and teachers to show us ways of functioning well together. They organized a change-making workshop session demonstrating, among other things, how to boost creativity. Inclusiveness was shown to us as a process, and teamwork as a sustainable value.

The students run group projects in the first year of the programme, working in teams of three or four to promote the MIIC and its students. In the ‘MIIC Talks’ project, invitations are sent to admired professional people who are asked to share their latest work and aims with students and teachers. ‘MIIC Alumni’ maintains a mailing list and relations with former students (profiles and interviews are posted online) and organizes an after-work social event in which there is a talk given by an alumnus. Job-dating sessions are organized by the students of the ‘MIIC Pro’ group, while debates and general visibility on social networks are the focus of the ‘MIIC Online’ group. The MIIC Magazine continues the interdisciplinary and inter-professional debate started at the ‘Cultureindustry’ conferences. The driver for making students work with each other is to promote the ability to empathize:

While the range may be broad, all soft skills share a common characteristic: they are dependent on the character or personality building of the individual. That character building involves the development or enhancement of empathy and sensibility, without which soft skills cannot exist. Without an understanding of the motivations and feelings of others, for example, one is unlikely to be an effective member of a team, an inspirational manager or an effective communicator. ²⁷

Learning outcomes for students and teachers

Lines can be drawn between the content and pedagogy of the MIIC and learning outcomes, including the ‘destinations’ of the students not only in terms of place (graduates are living and working in France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, New Caledonia, Argentina, China and the United States) or employment (they are employed by the many organizations and companies already mentioned in the introductory section of this article). ‘Destination’ also refers to what students think they can do with their lives as empowered individuals. Many tell us that they feel increasingly legitimate in professional situations and sometimes that they have superior qualities to students from business schools. In general, former students of the programme tend to feel that they have particular skills (curiosity, confidence, knowledge) to read today’s world, an ability to write well in at least two languages, confidence in a variety of academic domains and a multiple professional skill set. One alumnus, now a strategic planner with the Publicis group (Publicis Media France) wrote in 2018 that her learning experience on the Masters programme had given her an ability to understand societal change and the problems encountered by brands. She cited knowledge of literature and culture as giving her ‘insight’ into brands and their varied global journeys. She also said that there was a growing need for diversified teams in strategic planning, where curiosity and surprise could be maintained; humanities students with several languages were an increasing bonus because of their knowledge of semiology as well as their project management skills. This meant they could be proactive members of teams and could come up with new ideas and innovative solutions. Another alumnus, a research and business analyst at Médiametrie (specializing in audience measurement and research into audiovisual and digital media usage), working in its international section ‘Eurodata TV Worldwide’, wrote in 2018 that the MIIC curriculum had equipped him to deal with many aspects of his job: quantitative and qualitative media research, work in an international team in English and French, dealing with clients and their companies and the need to understand their needs and motivations. He felt that the breadth of the MIIC training (both theoretical and practical) had given him concrete experience in real-life work scenarios and situations in project management and entrepreneurship. Reading the signs and being able to detect meaning and change in the everyday world of image or text were also skills he valued and felt to be crucial for his current ability to work well in his job. Writing skills in English and French and the sociological and cultural studies encountered as theory had given depth and scope to his thinking and helped him produce new work. Being polyvalent (versatile or multiskilled) seemed to him to be a vital part of a thriving professional life.

Both students and teachers seem to feel empowered through their participation in the course. In France, university students sometimes see themselves as those who were not selected by the Grandes Ecoles. The approach is split between ultra-selected students and a university system which is meant to take all and has traditionally been opposed to any form of selectivity. Some of the most successful and innovative Masters programmes, however, are in the universities where positive reinforcement and a sense of autonomy are transmitted to the students. One university teacher said that the MIIC programme had changed his attitude to his job. As a specialist in modernist theatre and poetry, he had sometimes been concerned about the transferability of the literary skills he was imparting and unsure that what he taught was directly useful for his students. Seeing the way his classes were inflected by working alongside teachers from industry gave a new sense of the fine-tuning, ability to make connections and capacity for empathy that he gave his students. Students also gain confidence and realize that they are as good and sometimes better than other interns in terms of language skills, thought processes and general culture. Their English and French have a depth brought about by cultural understanding.

The millennials are typically victims of downturn – not only financial but also ecological and existential. The trente glorieuses (the post-war years of economic growth and relative wealth) are perceived to be well and truly over, and for many of this new generation negativity can set in. Yet never before have our students been so engaged in ecological and social concerns: like Walter Benjamin, for whom decline was not disappearance, our students have an ability to ‘organise pessimism’ (Benjamin, 1979 [1929]). They combine realism with hope, optimism with clear-sightedness. Much of that ability to think dialectically comes from the knowledge that they feel they can make changes to the world. This is partly the result of a quality fostered in the different modules by both professionals and academics: an ability to detect and interpret paradigm shifts. Paradigm or epistemological shifts underpin either tacitly or explicitly classes in project and brand management, cultural theory, visual studies, semiology or global studies. These shifts can describe a change in ways of processing reality (see Borsche, 1999: 51–66) whether through imagination or as investment in practice (see Foucault, 1994 [1966]: 168) ²⁸ and both are useful in thinking about the way art and letters collaborate in expressing change and in making change happen.

Raymond Williams encapsulated some of these intuitions in his concept ‘structure of feeling’ that was first used to characterize the lived experience of the quality of life at a particular time and place ²⁹ – what he called ‘emergent social formations’ – and the new semantic figures they produce. ³⁰ The ability to detect these new figures and shapes in social formations is what the students feel they have gained through daily reading of social networks, images, texts and their work with business, culture and politics. MIIC students focus on what Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup refer to as the ‘affective infrastructure’ (Sharma and Tygstrup, 2015: 2) by studying a particular group of people or a community to sense what it feels like to be part of that group. Empathetic understanding and an ability to translate cultural meaning are important here: what did it feel like to be in such and such a group, or to have been present at a particular event? To be able to understand this requires a ‘participant’s perspective on culture’ (Sharma and Tygstrup, 2015: 1). As we know, with the pervasive influence of social media, social presence is now linked to affect which is often performed or has become a performance in today’s world (one displays one’s emotions and allegiances as part of a ritual of belonging) and is no longer a private or interior matter. The affective call and affective agency triggered by social networks make Williams’s ideas even more useful since students are often able to detect the moment of emergence of cultural change. That moment is when ‘new sensibilities arise, when habits swerve’ (Sharma and Tygstrup, 2015: 4) ³¹ and is perhaps the central ingredient of cultural foresight. Henri Lefebvre (1991) suggested studying the city through its rhythms rather than its forms and Bruno Latour (2012) through the faint frequencies and what he calls the ‘plasma’ of the city while Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) underlines the shift from meanings to presences. The students have a sense of these fertile and often furtive messages and are made aware of their importance: the curation of weak signals that may aggregate, relate to each other in patterns and finally become meaningful is at the heart of their skills. The work being done with them in classes on clusters of meaning, brand management or sentiment analysis and SEO further enables them to locate areas of affect in all the complex meanings, assemblages and fluid states that surround us. This then enables them to forecast change.