L1AN0219 - TD - Géographie - MSchorung

The United States is living through a pivotal decade marked both by the multiplication of crises (economic, social, ecological, political) and by President D. Trump's two terms in office, which have led to a weakening of its social fabric and profound questioning. A global superpower increasingly challenged by China, the United States remains an essential diplomatic and military power. Its capacity for projection and its military deployment around the world are unrivalled, particularly in the Americas and the Pacific. The US economy remains a driving force in globalization, thanks to its highly productive and diversified agriculture, its superior tertiary services sector and its manufacturing activities - despite gradual deindustrialization since the 1990s - focused on high value-added sectors. This high level of integration into the global economy has led to major territorial differentiation between the old industrial regions and the deep rural areas in crisis, and the highly attractive metropolitan regions and maritime interfaces.  

The United States is marked by an increasingly tense social context, with fragmentation between multi-ethnic metropolitan America and rural, small-town America, and a historic accentuation of social and ethno-racial inequalities. Mobilizations against police violence and systemic racism, embodied in particular by the Black Lives Matter movement, are a symptom of these growing social fractures. The U.S. population is also undergoing profound changes as a result of the aging of the population and, above all, successive waves of migration. In short, the United States is facing a new multipolar geopolitical context and historic challenges (political and social cohesion, socio-economic inequalities, ecological transformations and adaptations to climate change) that we will explore in this course (in the second semester) dedicated to "Geographies of the United States".