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Tri-Co Philly Program

Courses

Spring 2025

Housing Issues in Philadelphia (SOCL B260)

Nora Taplin-Kaguru, BMC
Monday, 12:10-3:00 p.m.


In the late 19th century, Philadelphia’s boosters described the city as the “City of Homes” to celebrate its success compared to other major cities in the US in providing housing and opportunities for homeownership for its growing population of workers. This class investigates the unique history of housing in Philadelphia. We will cover the problems the city has faced and still faces in providing affordable housing, fair access to housing and creating diverse and vibrant neighborhoods and its great legacy of innovation in this area. We will use Philadelphia as a case for investigating the relationship between housing, the economy, locational resources, and neighborhood development. We will see how racial capitalism shapes what housing is built, where it is built and who has access to it.

Through the Tri-Co Philly program students will engage with this literature as part of an immersive experience in the city and gain a deeper understanding of the practice of engaging with housing issues for professionals and political actors. Students will have opportunities to meet with organizations working on affordable housing, fair housing and historic preservation, and to do neighborhood tours related to the texts we read (possibly including touring Society Hill, Fishtown and the historic 7th Ward). When possible, we will invite local residents, practitioners and scholars in the field to lead these neighborhood tours. Students will become familiar with a variety of different professionals and community members working on housing issues from urban planners to community organizers. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Access to Finance: a Philly Perspective (ECON H206B)

Shannon Mudd, HC
Thursday, 12:00-3:00 p.m.


Households of low to moderate income struggle in multiple ways. To what extent can access to appropriate financial tools help alleviate some of their stress? While microcredit, the provision of small loans to people in poverty, is typically associated with developing countries, issues of access to appropriate financial products are everywhere.

This course focuses on Access to Finance in the US and will involve direct engagement with Philadelphia organizations dealing with the issue that finance might address - and both the potential and actual problems that arise withing households, small business and the industries that are in the ecosystem supporting them. We will read books, articles and studies to ground us in different understandings of poverty and households' financial needs, whether theoretical, empirical and/or directly observed. And, we will examine how the financial sector and adjacent industries are providing products and services to serve those households and small businesses, not always in helpful ways. We will look at eco-systems, providers, regulators and financial literacy.

A major portion of the class will be project-based and will have you take a deep dive into one of the Philly organizations involved in access to finance to better understand what they do, how they are doing it and how they are making strategic decisions. We will develop basic analytical skills and deploy useful frameworks to better understand the operations of each organization. And, we will assess how their success is affected both by the capabilities they bring and the environment in which they are working. This class will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Come join Professor Mudd in the city and learn together the issues and current local efforts to deal with them.

Philadelphia Music City (MUSI 005C)

James Blasina, SC
Wednesday, 12:00-3:00 p.m.

Philadelphia has always been a leader in musical creativity, and a full participant in regional, national, and global musical discourses. How have contemporary and historical sociopolitical contexts of Philly shaped music making here? How has musical creativity shaped today’s Philadelphia?

This course is a history of music in Philadelphia, but also a musical history of Philadelphia. As the first capital of the United States, Philly nurtured a rich musical life—both professional and amateur, often linked with governing and diplomacy. In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was home to a vibrant music publishing industry, and many of the institutions that animate our contemporary musical life—the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Curtis Institute, for example—were founded during this time. The Great Migrations of the early twentieth century brought thousands of African Americans from the rural south to work in the city’s industrial plant, bringing musical traditions—blues, gospel, and later, jazz—that would make Philadelphia a vanguard of popular musical developments. Successive immigrants would bring diverse musical traditions and deploy musical performance as a means of participation in an American “mainstream,” to be investigated and problematized in this class. Television shows like American Bandstand brought Philadelphia’s musical youth culture to the living rooms of the nation, and propelled rock ‘n’ roll artists like Chubby Checker to global renown. Artists like Nina Simone made music explicitly political, through involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Philadelphia International Records brought Philly soul to the market, led by artists like Patti LaBelle and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. While historical in orientation, this course also investigates contemporary music making in Philadelphia; for example, how artists like Valencia, Grayscale, and Lay Bankz have cultivated Philly’s DIY music scene. We will attend live musical performances, visit local record stores, and interact with scholars and musicians beyond our classroom.

In sum, students in this course will learn about music in the Philadelphia that either emerged here or was part of global musical trends and flourished here (or both!), but will also learn to use music as historical evidence for uncovering the history and contemporary life of the city. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

No background in music is necessary for success in this course.

Fall 2024

Food Cultures in Philadelphia (ENGL B287)

Kate Thomas, BMC
Tuesday, 12:10-3:00 p.m.

Philadelphia has an exceptionally rich dining culture. “Jeet yet?” is a common refrain in a city that boasts African American, Italian and German communities of long standing, and more recent, culinarily impactful settlement by East Asian and Mexican populations. This course will explore the deep history of dining in Philadelphia, from Lenape foodways to the skills of Hercules Posey – George Washington’s enslaved chef – to the recent participation of Philadelphia cooks and restaurateurs in social justice movements.

Topics that this class will pursue range across time and culture, engaging cross-cultural and cross-temporal questions like: immigration, religion and food, Philadelphia’s place at the center of local and global networks of production and extraction, social dining clubs vs home cooking, the shifting history of street markets, publishing culture and the recipe book, false abundance and food deserts. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Grassroots Economies: Creating Livelihoods in an Age of Urban Inequality (POLS H262)

Craig Borowiak, HC
Wednesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

We live in an age of intensifying economic inequality, the consequences of which are reflected in the landscapes of many modern cities. In Philadelphia, for example, decades of deindustrialization and urban flight have left the city pockmarked with abandoned lots, deep poverty, and segregated neighborhoods while new capitalist developments have led to concentrated wealth in the city center and gentrifying outward pressures on nearby neighborhoods. For many city dwellers, the mainstream economy is a source of alienation and disempowerment. When that economy fails to provide, what options remain?

The aim of the course would be to examine the political and economic constraints generated by poverty and racial and class segregation in contemporary urban environments and how grassroots economic initiatives rooted in mutual aid often fill the gaps and provide alternative ways to meet needs and generate supportive community. Examples of such initiatives range from guerrilla gardens and artist collectives to worker cooperatives and informal revolving loan funds. Many of these initiatives are informal. Some are legal, others less so. Many also fall under the radar of mainstream studies, which instead focus on capitalist markets, government welfare, and nonprofit philanthropy. Though many grassroots economic initiatives take place on a relatively small scale, they have a much larger footprint and impact when they are looked at together. The course will engage with them both theoretically and with numerous concrete examples and interactive experiences with practitioners. We will also examine various efforts in different cities to cultivate solidarity-based economic alternatives through public-private partnerships and grassroots coalitions. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of countries, though the focus will be on U.S. cities, with a particular emphasis on Philadelphia. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Key themes will include: capitalism and post-capitalism, diverse economies, gentrification, public vs. private, geographies of inequality, mapping economic alternatives, informal moral economies, community gardens, DIY, and cooperatives.

Philadelphia and the 2024 Election (SOCI 056C)

Daniel Laurison, SC
Monday, 12:00-3:00 p.m.

This course will cover, as the title suggests, the role of people and political organizations in Philadelphia in the 2024 Election as it is happening. We will work together to understand how people understand politics, and how political campaigns, PACs, and non-profit organizations work to persuade and mobilize potential voters.

We will use the 2024 elections as a case study for understanding some of the most pressing issues in American democracy: the stark inequality in political participation, the sense many people have that electoral politics doesn’t represent them, and the ways in which the rules & structure of our electoral system skew representation towards those with more resources. In the first third of the course, we will read existing studies of political behavior with a particular focus on the role of class and race in shaping how people relate to politics. In the middle third, we will read work on how political elites and institutions affect and respond to political participation. In both these sections of class, scholarly readings will be paired with following news and polling about the Presidential and other elections in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. We will discuss the extent to which these accounts reflect (or ignore) social scientific understandings of how elections work. The last third of the semester will have a lighter reading load in order to allow time to focus on our research project; we will read about research methods, and continue deepening our understanding of the social science on elections.

We will be embarking on a collective research project over the course of the semester to better understand how political messaging and campaign-related organizing and canvassing affect the ways regular people (i.e., non-elite/poor and working-class people) make sense of and engage with politics. Every member of the class will be part of recruiting for, organizing, and conducting focus groups with people in communities across Philadelphia, as well as analyzing and reporting on our results.

The course will give students both a broad understanding of the social science of campaigns, elections and voting behavior as well as a hands-on sense of how these dynamics are playing out in 2024 in Philadelphia. Assignments will include weekly reading reflection papers and a final paper based on our collaborative research. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Past Courses

  • Spring 2024

    Literature in and of Philadelphia, 1682-1865 (ENGL B307)

    Bethany Schneider, BMC
    Tuesday, 12:10-3:00 p.m.

    Love and freedom are words that constantly intertwine in the literatures of Philadelphia’s self-fashioning. Known, of course, as the City of Brotherly Love, William Penn’s projected utopia of religious freedom was, before the Civil War, the hotbed of political, racial, cultural and sexual revolution. The city where, in the shadow of plague and rising racism, the first non-violent Civil Rights protests took place and where Black Americans forged a literature of both freedom and beloved community. A city where, under lenient Quaker law, marriage laws allowed for greater sexual freedom than elsewhere in the country, where women were better educated than anywhere else in the world, and where experiments in gender equality and indeed, gender diversity, were able to proceed in relative peace. In this course, and in the city itself, we will examine literature written in and about Philadelphia before the Civil War, exploring how and why Philadelphians engaged questions of love, freedom and non-freedom. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program and make use of the city’s archives, museums and historical sites.

    History and Politics of Punishment: School to Prison Pipeline (POLS 20E)

    Keith Reeves, SC
    Wednesday, 12:00–3:00 p.m.

    This inter-disciplinary upper-level seminar will explore the complex school policies, teacher instructional decisions, as well as historical, political, social, economic, cultural, and structural forces that have given rise to documented reality of the “school-to-prison pipeline.” More specifically, what policies and practices within a school’s learning environment push students out of the education system and into the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems? Why do the consequences fall so heavily and disproportionately on minority and low-income students? What is the impact on childhood and learning “joy?” What is the role of law enforcement? Are there other stakeholders whose involvement exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline? What is the impact on family structure, upward mobility, and neighborhood stability? And finally, what can educators and other stakeholders do to prevent and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline?

    Over the course of the semester, we will be joined by several key stakeholders (i.e., teachers and school administrators, prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement personnel; take a tour of one of the local Philadelphia jails; and visit Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site).

    University City: Race, Power and Politics in Philadelphia (PEAC H327)

    Dennis Hogan, HC & Andy Hines, SC
    Thursday, 12:30–3:00 p.m.

    For over twenty years, the largest private employer in Philadelphia has been the University of Pennsylvania and its hospital system. In fact, three of the top five largest employers are universities and their affiliated medical centers; Thomas Jefferson University and Temple University also make the cut. Including these institutions, there are fifty-five colleges and universities of varying size, shape, and public/private status in Philadelphia. How did it come to be that universities have taken on such a large political and economic role in not just Philadelphia, but many American cities that otherwise share little in common? This class aims to trace the history of higher education and its ongoing impact on the geography, economy, and culture of greater Philadelphia and U.S. urban space broadly. Practically, this means an attention to the urban landscape; social, cultural, and political movements that emerge from these institutions; and how non-profit institutions relate to government at every level. These wide aims require an interdisciplinary approach drawing on work in critical university studies, cultural studies, political and economic theory, history, urban studies, and critical theory.

    Students will write papers that engage their relationship to the force of higher education in American cities and that generate historical and cultural investigations of how major institutions impact urban life in Philadelphia. In addition, students will develop creative/critical public projects in myriad formats (video, paper, podcast, historical marker, etc.) that interpret and mark the place of these institutions in Philadelphia while attending to the complexity of university-based community engagement projects. This class will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

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  • Fall 2023

    Public Art, Historical Preservation and the Ethics of Commemoration (PHIL B234)

    Macalester Bell, BMC
    Monday 12:10–3:00 p.m.

    Philadelphia has the largest number of public artworks in the country, and it is also the first city in the nation to require that developers use a portion of their construction project for public art. Philadelphia is also a city of unique historical significance with many historical sites and memorials. In this course, we will take advantage of Philadelphia’s rich history and public art resources as we consider a number of philosophical questions about the nature of public art, political aesthetics, historical preservation, and the ethics of commemoration. Some of the questions we will consider include the following: What is public art? What is public space? What is the role of public art in a democracy? Does the fact that something is historically significant give us a reason to preserve it? Which historically significant things should we preserve and why? What is the moral value of commemorative art? How should we assess controversies surrounding the removal of art honoring persons or groups we now judge to be morally objectionable? How best should we memorialize victims of injustice?

    We will approach the philosophical questions at the heart of this course using contemporary philosophical texts and case studies drawn from the public artwork and historic sites in Philadelphia. We will visit specific sites as well as community organizations devoted to public art and historical preservation. .

    Epidemic City: Philadelphia from Yellow Fever to COVID-19 (HLTH H216)

    Nicholas Bonneau, HC
    Wednesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

    Epidemics have long been fundamental forces shaping the experience of urban life in the United States; as such, they represent powerful lenses through which to explore pressing questions at the intersection of health and disease, urban politics and design, and the social and communal fabric of urban life. This course will examine the history of epidemic disease in American cities, with a focus on Philadelphia. Students will examine how Philadelphia and other American cities have responded to epidemic disease throughout history, and, in turn, how epidemic diseases have shaped urban space and urban life, considering such questions as: How have epidemics shaped residents’ experiences of their cities, neighborhoods, and communities? How have epidemics shaped—and been shaped by—racial, class, and gender inequalities? How have evolving medical ideas—from miasma theory to the bacteriological revolution—shaped cities’ responses to health crises? How has epidemic disease impacted urban architecture, infrastructure, and design? How have responses to epidemics led to the stigmatization of marginalized and immigrant communities, or to the pathologization of disfavored urban spaces? How have urban public health agencies, health activists, and community organizations shaped urban responses to epidemics?

    The course will be organized around a series of historical case studies of epidemic disease in Philadelphia and other American cities. Each unit will also provide students with an opportunity to meaningfully engage with historical sites and institutions in Philadelphia, or with invited speakers and experts. Case studies may include the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s; cholera, typhoid, and other “filth” diseases in the nineteenth century; polio and influenza in the early twentieth century; HIV/AIDS; and COVID-19. Site visits will include locations such as the Philadelphia Lazaretto, the American Philosophical Society Library, and the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

    Environmental Justice: Ethnography, Politics, Action/Philadelphia (ENVS 035/SOAN 035)

    Giovanna Di Chiro, SC
    Tuesday, 12:00-3:00 p.m.

    An introduction to the history and theory of environmental justice, an interdisciplinary field that examines how inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, and gender shape how different groups of people are impacted by environmental problems and how they advocate for social and environmental change. This semester the course will be taught at the Philadelphia Friends Center and will concentrate on urban environmental justice issues and creative strategies for change in Philadelphia. Drawing on the work of scholars and activists from a wide variety of disciplines in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts & humanities, we critically examine the conceptual divisions between “nature and society,” “urban and rural,” and the“community and the planet.” We will analyze the history of the widely used concept of “sustainability” focusing on the diverse ways it has been embraced, transformed, and implemented in different cultural and urban contexts. We will investigate some of the challenges facing cities like Philadelphia as they implement sustainability initiatives and try to avoid “green gentrification” (sustainability improvements such as green buildings, eco-parks, and upscale farmers’ markets that increase property values, pricing out and displacing local, low-income residents). We will likewise explore the promise of urban areas as important centers for supporting the flourishing of diverse, equitable, and ecologically sustainable communities. Course incorporates a community-based learning component.

    Friday 12:15-3 p.m. is an occasional meeting time for program students only

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  • Spring 2023

    Core Course

    Popular Music and Media (GMST 026/FMST 026/LITR 026/MUSI 005E)
    Sunka Simon & James Blasina, SC
    Wednesday 12:00–3:00 p.m. and Friday 12:15-3:00 p.m.*
    *Friday is an occasional meeting time for program students only.

    What do classical music, teenie bop, soul, battle rap, and jazz have in common? Philadelphia. This team-taught interdisciplinary course investigates the histories, structures and cultural connections between popular music and other media in the city of Philadelphia. What links sound, image, and place? How do musical expressions and genres interact with urban life at specific junctures in Philadelphia history? How do modes of production and exhibition formats (radio vs. television, club v.s stadium) along with distribution venues (record store vs. Spotify) engage with genre, gender, and race configurations? What lies at the intersection of regional, national, and global fan cultures? How does celebrity culture then and now impact what is popular and how does it affect Philadelphia’s music industry and vice versa? Providing a grounding in music and media history and theory, we will research and analyze mainstream and independent Philadelphia-specific case studies in radio, film, theater, television and social media in order to better understand and engage with the complex webs that characterize contemporary media, its production, and its consumption. Student projects will explore the intersections and interactions between individuals, ethnic and racial groups, established and new Philadelphians, city government, region, empire, and nation that have and continue to shape Philadelphia through the music and media created here.

    Elective Courses

    Contemporary Art and Film in Philadelphia (HART B380)
    Homay King, BMC
    Tuesday 12:10 p.m.–3:00 p.m.

    This course will explore the vibrant contemporary art world of the city of Philadelphia—a city uniquely positioned to attract artists with its many top-tier fine art schools, world-class museums, affordable living and studio spaces, and thriving network of artist-run galleries and exhibition spaces. Some of our sessions will take the form of seminar discussions with readings in the theory and history of contemporary art and film at the Trico Philly campus, while some will involve visits to local museums, galleries, cinemas, and art institutes, and meetings with arts professionals. We will discuss whether the distinction between film and other forms of lensed, moving imagery on the one hand and contemporary art on the other continues to matter, whether from a conceptual, institutional, or economic perspective. Site visits are subject to change but may include the Philadelphia Academy of Fines Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Vox Populi, and BlackStar Film Festival. Prerequisite: prior coursework in the History of Art, Film Studies, and/or Visual Studies. Requirements: strong, active participation in discussions and meetings with guests, final research paper of 8-10 pages. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

    City of Brotherly Love: Immigration and Images of a Changing City (GERM H210)
    Imke Brust, HC
    Wednesday, 12:00–3:00 p.m.

    Generally, the course will engage with the history of Philadelphia as an immigrant city and look at the ways in which the different neighborhoods have changed over time. More specifically, it will highlight aspects of Philadelphia’s early German-speaking community, which made up about 45% of the city’s total residents in 1760 and about 33% in 1800 (Minardi). For example, Germantown, Brewerytown, and Olney were at some point primarily German-speaking neighborhoods, which then became primarily African-American, and in the case of Olney, Asian-American. Our analysis would scrutinize how the city demographically and visually transformed by looking at different maps, images, paintings etc. Furthermore, the course would also explore what attracted the various populations to the city at different historic times. In collaboration with HIAS, StoriesthatLive and Puentes de Salud, we would study how European Jews and Latin-Americans found refuge in the city of brotherly love. Initially, the Pennsylvania German Society of Philadelphia was also created in 1764, to help German speaking immigrants in need. Students will create a short film project about a person, who chose to immigrate to and found home in Philadelphia. Moreover, the course would touch on how the different populations perceived each other at different historic moments. For example, German speaking people often took on a mediating role between Native Americans and Anglo-Saxons in the early years of the United States. Our course materials would consist of a mix of biographical, historical, literary and art material. The course, which will be taught in English, is open to both German and non-German speakers. There will be an extra session in German for students taking it for German credit. This class will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

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  • Fall 2022

    Core Course

    SOCL B232 A Sociological Journey to Immigrant Communities in Contemporary Greater Philadelphia
    Veronica Montes, BMC
    Monday 12:10–3:00 p.m. and Friday 12:15-3:00 p.m.*
    *Friday is an occasional meeting time for program students only.

    This course will use the lenses of sociology to critically and comparatively examine various immigrant communities that historically, economically, politically, and socially have shaped the city of Philadelphia. Specifically, this course seeks to interrogate, what push factors make immigrants to leave their homelands, what pull factors make Philadelphia becoming the chosen new residence for these immigrants, how these factors have changed across time and along race/ethnicity/gender lines of the different migrant communities that have settled in Philadelphia. To achieve these ends, this course sheds light on how immigrant communities have shaped the city at different points in time and how the Philadelphia metropolitan region has shaped immigrants’ lives. Finally, the course also familiarizes students with Philadelphia’s history and with its socioeconomic and political transformations, and how old and new Philadelphians have faced those changes. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

    Elective Courses

    POLS H262 Grassroots Economies: Creating Livelihoods in an Age of Urban Inequality
    Craig Borowiak, HC
    Tuesday 12:30 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

    We live in an age of intensifying economic inequality, the consequences of which are reflected in the landscapes of many modern cities. In Philadelphia, for example, decades of deindustrialization and urban flight have left the city pockmarked with abandoned lots, deep poverty, and segregated neighborhoods while new capitalist developments have led to concentrated wealth in the city center and gentrifying outward pressures on nearby neighborhoods. For many city dwellers, the mainstream economy is a source of alienation and disempowerment. When that economy fails to provide, what options remain?

    The aim of the course would be to examine the political and economic constraints generated by poverty and racial and class segregation in contemporary urban environments and how grassroots economic initiatives rooted in mutual aid often fill the gaps and provide alternative ways to meet needs and generate supportive community. Examples of such initiatives range from guerrilla gardens and artist collectives to worker cooperatives and informal revolving loan funds. Many of these initiatives are informal. Some are legal, others less so. Many also fall under the radar of mainstream studies, which instead focus on capitalist markets, government welfare, and nonprofit philanthropy. Though many grassroots economic initiatives take place on a relatively small scale, they have a much larger footprint and impact when they are looked at together. The course will engage with them both theoretically and with numerous concrete examples and interactive experiences with practitioners. We will also examine various efforts in different cities to cultivate solidarity-based economic alternatives through public-private partnerships and grassroots coalitions. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of countries, though the focus will be on U.S. cities, with a particular emphasis on Philadelphia. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

    Key themes will include: capitalism and post-capitalism, diverse economies, gentrification, public vs. private, geographies of inequality, mapping economic alternatives, informal moral economies, community gardens, DIY, and cooperatives.

    ARTT 006B Monuments and Public Space: Studio Architecture
    Jody Joyner, SC
    Wednesday, 12:00–3:00 p.m.

    Over the course of the semester, we will visit and study monuments in and around the Philadelphia area, examining who, what events, and what stories are marked and made visible throughout the city. The class will visit artists and architects' studios and meet with several Philadelphia-based organizations such as Monument Lab, Monument Biography, and Streets Dept. to learn about their inclusive, process-based approaches to public art and history. Through considering how public works are funded, authored, designed, and fabricated we will aim to deepen our understanding of the entities and mechanisms that shape public space. During the second half of the semester, students will engage in an extended design thinking process, working in small groups to design and prototype new public monuments for a designated local site. Students will have the opportunity to bring greater visibility to narratives and histories they want to emphasize through this hands-on design process. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

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  • Spring 2022

    Core Course

    POLS H229 Power and Politics in Philadelphia
    Steve McGovern, HC
    Tuesday 12:00–2:30 p.m. and Friday 12:15-3:00 p.m.*
    *Friday is an occasional meeting time for program students only.

    This course, offered as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, examines power and politics in contemporary Philadelphia. We will devote particular attention to the potential and limitations of grassroots mobilization as a mechanism for effecting positive change. To what extent can community-based organizations and public interest groups alter long-standing policies, practices, and institutions in a large, American city like Philadelphia? To what extent are their efforts impeded by well-established interests and structural forces rooted in race, ethnicity, class, and culture? How have recent societal shifts affected underlying tensions between Old Philadelphia and New Philadelphia?

    We will explore who wins and who loses in the political arena through a series of case studies of key policy issues that are highly salient to the people of Philadelphia, including criminal justice reform, immigrants’ rights, gentrification and affordable housing, urban development, and workforce diversity. How these policy issues are resolved will reveal much about the nature of power and whether the source of that power springs from the bottom-up or remains primarily a top-down phenomenon. This discussion-based seminar will feature guest speakers, site visits, and an opportunity to conduct your own research on power and politics in Philadelphia.

    Elective Courses

    CITY B207 History of Philadelphia Architecture and Urbanism
    Jeffrey Cohen, BMC
    Thursday 10:10 a.m.–1:00 p.m.

    City 207 explores Philadelphia’s architectural and urban evolution over five centuries. We’ll look very closely at buildings -- both the extraordinary and the more normative in different eras – while also devising a firm orientation within historical geographies of growth, functional differentiation, and social patterning.

    In this year’s special iteration as part of Trico in the City, we’ll take advantage of our presence downtown with walks almost every week to collectively interrogate our settings. We’ll visit both historical buildings and informational repositories, the latter serving as our laboratory for learning to tap archival sources in constructing new knowledge about buildings and urban change.

    POLS 031 Borders and Migration
    Osman Balkan, SC
    Wednesday, 12:00–3:00 p.m.

    This course offers an introduction to the causes and consequences of international migration and examines how various countries have responded to the phenomenon. We begin by considering the many reasons why people move from one place to another and analyze the different strategies through which political authorities have tried to simultaneously facilitate and obstruct migratory flows. The tension between mobility and containment is a central feature of migration politics and our first set of readings offer a broad, historical overview of the relationship between states and migrants within the dynamics of global capitalism. Students will learn about patterns of regular and irregular migration, including economic and undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers and evaluate the impact of war and climate change on human displacement. We will also investigate the efficacy of border walls and other tactics of containment and control such detention and deportation, surveillance and documentation, and the production of “illegality.”

    We then consider how migration transforms both sending and receiving countries and examine how different nation-states accommodate (or fail to accommodate) newcomers to their territories. The growing racial, religious, and linguistic diversity generated by international migratory flows continues to generate fierce debates over national identity, social cohesion, economic prosperity, and political stability in many parts of the word. In order to make sense of these debates we will analyze different regimes of immigrant integration, incorporation, and assimilation and evaluate the meaning of citizenship, social membership, and belonging as it pertains to the lived experience of migrants. Our readings examine how intersecting axes of identity such as race, religion, ethnicity, cultural heritage and migratory history underpin durable structures of socio-economic inequality.

    The capstone project for this course is an oral history interview with an immigrant. This exercise offers students an opportunity to further deepen their qualitative research skills and to assess the explanatory power of various theoretical frameworks and analytical concepts that we will learn about during the course of the semester. This is an experiential, immersive-learning based class. Our classroom meetings will be supplemented with field trips, guest lectures, and discussions with scholars and practitioners working to advance the rights of migrants in the Philadelphia area and beyond.

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  • Fall 2021

    Narrativity and Hip Hop (ENGL B216)
    Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, BMC
    Tuesday 2:10–5:00 p.m.

    This course explores narrative and poetic forms and themes in hip-hop culture in Philadelphia and beyond. Through close, intensive analysis of hip hop lyrics, as well as audiovisual performance and film, we will consider how artists from the late twentieth century onward have used the hip hop to extend, engage, and complicate key concerns of literature in general, and African American and African Diaspora literature in particular. How do literary tropes such as the cautionary tale, the coming-of-age narrative, the quest narrative, the redemption narrative, the protest narrative, and the coming-out story influence hip hop texts? What possibilities do these forms of hip-hop storytelling open for our analysis of cultural and political life in 2021? Focusing on the musical and literary cultures of Philadelphia and drawing links to other contexts, we will take up these questions through an analysis of hip hop texts from the late 1970s to the current moment, including works by Philadelphia rappers The Roots, Meek Mill, and Lady Cannon, as well as Queen Latifah, Kendrick Lamar, Kurtis Blow, Notorious B.I.G., Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, Nitty Scott, KripHop Nation, Bad Bunny, Megan Thee Stallion, KC Ortiz and others. Reading these alongside Philly-focused stories and other narrative works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Asali Solomon, we will examine how hip hop intervenes in narratives about nation, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic location, (dis)ability, and intersectional political engagement across space, time, and genre. Through a series of in-class visits from Philadelphia rappers, writers, and activists, as well as excursions exploring the city’s hip hop and literary cultures, we will consider how Philadelphia’s cultural and historical complexity offers fodder for a rich intersectional analysis of hip hop storytelling. Conditions permitting, this course will be taught in Philadelphia at the Friends Center.

    Urban Places, Historical Spaces: Society, Health and Social Justice in Philadelphia (HLTH H211)
    Patricia Kelly, HC
    Wednesday 10:15–12:45 p.m.

    Cities are dynamic sites of social change and social tension; impacted by migration, globalization, de/industrialization and technological shifts, Philadelphia is both the birthplace of American democracy and the nation’s poorest large city. This course will take a broad view of the nation’s first capital, in anthropological, geographic, and historical perspective. Our primary themes will be social justice and health. We will explore and analyze health, activism, inequalities, and social movements in the city through various lenses, including: food; migration and ethnic enclaves; the built environment; race, class and space; tourism and historical memory; policing; and education. This course is part of the TriCo Philly program and does NOT take place on campus; rather students will spend one week engaging in reading and discussion on our topics at the Friends Center in Center City and the following week visiting field sites throughout the city, engaging with speakers and conducting anthropological observation.

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  • Fall 2020

    Core Course

    SOCI 048I Race and Place: A Philadelphia Story
    Nina Johnson, SC
    Wednesday 2:00–5:00 p.m.

    Using Philadelphia neighborhoods as our site of study, this course will analyze the relationship between race/ethnicity and spatial inequality, emphasizing the institutions, processes, and mechanisms that shape the lives of urban dwellers. We will survey major theoretical approaches and empirical investigations of racial and ethnic stratification in cities, their concomitant policy considerations, and the impact at the local level in Philadelphia. As part of The Tri-Co Philly Program, this course will take place in the city and engage scholars, practitioners, community members, and leaders as teachers, learners, and researchers alongside students in the course.

    Elective Courses

    PHIL B234 The Nature of Public Art and the Ethics of Commemoration
    Macalester Bell, BMC
    Wednesday 2:30–4:30 p.m.

    Philadelphia has the largest number of public artworks in the country and is also the first city in the nation to require that developers use a portion of their construction budget for public art. It is also home to a number of well-known memorials. In this course, we will take up a number of philosophical questions about the nature of public art, political aesthetics, and the ethics of commemoration using case studies drawn from Philadelphia. Some of the questions we will consider include the following: What is public art? What is public space? What is the role of public art in a democracy? Is there a distinct category of “street art” which can be distinguished from public art on the one hand and graffiti on the other? What is the moral value of commemorative art? What, if anything, do we have a moral obligation to commemorate and what grounds that obligation? How should we assess controversies surrounding the removal of art honoring persons or groups many judge to be morally objectionable, such as Confederate monuments? How should we memorialize victims of injustice?

    We will explore these and related questions through contemporary philosophical texts and informed by case studies of public art and memorials in the Philadelphia metro area. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program. Our class time will be used for lecture and discussion as well as walking tours and site visits.

    POLS H262 Grassroots Economies: Creating Livelihoods in an Age of Urban Inequality
    Craig Borowiak, HC
    Monday, 10:15–12:45 p.m. and Friday*, 12:15–3:00 p.m.
    *Friday is an occasional meeting time for program students only.

    We live in an age of intensifying economic inequality, the consequences of which are reflected in the landscapes of many modern cities. In Philadelphia, for example, decades of deindustrialization and urban flight have left the city pockmarked with abandoned lots, deep poverty, and segregated neighborhoods while new capitalist developments have led to concentrated wealth in the city center and gentrifying outward pressures on nearby neighborhoods. For many city dwellers, the mainstream economy is a source of alienation and disempowerment. When that economy fails to provide, what options remain?

    The aim of the course would be to examine the political and economic constraints generated by poverty and racial and class segregation in contemporary urban environments and how grassroots economic initiatives rooted in mutual aid often fill the gaps and provide alternative ways to meet needs and generate supportive community. Examples of such initiatives range from guerrilla gardens and artist collectives to worker cooperatives and informal revolving loan funds. Many of these initiatives are informal. Some are legal, others less so. Many also fall under the radar of mainstream studies, which instead focus on capitalist markets, government welfare, and nonprofit philanthropy. Though many grassroots economic initiatives take place on a relatively small scale, they have a much larger footprint and impact when they are looked at together. The course will engage with them both theoretically and with numerous concrete examples and interactive experiences with practitioners. We will also examine various efforts in different cities to cultivate solidarity-based economic alternatives through public-private partnerships and grassroots coalitions. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of countries, though the focus will be on U.S. cities, with a particular emphasis on Philadelphia. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

    Key themes will include: capitalism and post-capitalism, diverse economies, gentrification, public vs. private, geographies of inequality, mapping economic alternatives, informal moral economies, community gardens, DIY, and cooperatives.

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  • Spring 2020

    Core Course

    CITY B214 The Philadelphia Mosaic: Immigrant Communities in the City
    Liv Raddatz
    Wednesday/Friday 12:15–3:00 p.m.

    This is the core course for the Tri-Co Philly Program and will be taught in Philadelphia. This course explores the experiences and city-making strategies of immigrant communities in the Greater Philadelphia Area from roughly the late 19th century to the present day. It sheds light on how immigrant communities have shaped the city at different points in time and how the Philadelphia metropolitan region, as an urban context, has shaped immigrants’ lives. The course also familiarizes students with Philadelphia’s history, transformations of the metropolitan region in recent decades and current economic, social and spatial dynamics as well as key immigration concepts and theories.

    Elective Courses

    ECON 003 Behavioral Public Policy in the City
    Syon Bhanot
    Tuesday/Friday 12:15–3:00 p.m.

    Recent years have seen tremendous growth in the policy influence of behavioral science, a term covering behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields. Insights from these fields, which explore how individual behavior frequently deviates from so-called "rational choice" models, have helped policymakers develop tools to improve both outcomes for citizens and the way policymakers use data and evidence in their own operations. In this course (which will convene in Philadelphia), students will be exposed not only to the core concepts underlying behavioral science, but also to the nuts and bolts of one high-level policy effort to integrate behavioral science into city government - right here in Philadelphia (though the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative, or PBSI, an academia-policy collaboration under the umbrella of GovLabPHL, a multi-agency team led by the Mayor's Policy Office). Conceptually, the course will cover many behavioral science topics, including judgment under uncertainty, heuristics and biases, self-control and procrastination, and social influence, along with methodological topics related to experiments and their role in social science. Furthermore, students will have the opportunity to interact with a number of guest speakers from city agencies and other city-based organizations, who have worked on behavioral science efforts in the city through PBSI. Field visits and group exercises built around actual, ongoing behavioral science projects in the city are also planned as components of the course.

    HLTH H233 Philadelphia’s Opioid Crisis: Causes, Consequences, and Interventions
    Community Engagement and Social Responsibility
    Anne Montgomery
    Thursday, 10:05–12:35 p.m. and Friday, 12:15–3:00 p.m.

    Opioid-related fatalities are said to represent the deadliest drug crisis in American history. In 2016, drug overdose killed approximately 64,000 people, making it the leading cause of death in Americans under 50. Philadelphia has among the highest overdose death rates in large US counties, and the city government has called this “the greatest public health crisis in a century.” Philadelphia is also poised to become first in the US to open a safe injection site for opioid use, despite opposition from the federal government. Taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, this course will draw on direct student engagement and the experience of community partners – including medical practitioners, harm reduction activists, politicians, journalists, people who use drugs, and affected communities – to interrogate the causes and consequences of drug overdose. We will also critically analyze political debates about how to respond to the crisis. The course is interdisciplinary and highlights three main lenses through which to analyze the crisis: public health & medical science, values & politics, and social justice & principles of ethical engagement. Students are expected to commit an average of three hours per week to a community placement that addresses the overdose crisis. In the past, students have volunteered with Prevention Point, Pathways to Housing, SOL Collective, and Project SAFE, as well as with the department of health, addiction clinics, and emergency rooms.

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  • Fall 2019

    Core Course

    EDUC 067 Fight for #PhlEd: Urban Educational and Environmental Justice
    Edwin Mayorga
    Monday: 12:10–2:55 p.m.

    This course is the core course for the TriCo Philly Program and will be taught in Philadelphia. Fight for #PhlEd is an examination of urbanism and environmental justice as seen through of urban education politics in Philadelphia and other US cities. Course readings, discussions and related field experiences will focus on various perspectives on key issues and debates confronting urban education as it relates to urban development and environmental sustainability and justice. We will draw heavily on theories and approaches from critical geography, critical theories of race and political economy, which will provide us a frame for examining research, policy, pedagogy and social movements as vehicles for addressing the challenges that shape the social, cultural, and geographic conditions of teaching, learning and community development. The city of Philadelphia, its racially and ethnically diverse communities, and its public schools, will function as our focus and, more importantly, who we will seek to build alongside, over the course of the semester.

    Elective Courses

    ANTH H309/ENVS H309: Place, People and Collaborative Research in Philadelphia
    Joshua Moses
    Tuesday/Friday: 12:10–2:55 p.m.

    Taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, this transdisciplinary, Philadelphia-based, course focuses on critical urban environmental issues. With the blunt challenges of global warming and inequality in mind, we seek to apply theory to the practice of engagement with ongoing urban struggles. Collaborative environmental work with urban communities is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on anthropology, urban planning, public health, ecology, and geography. Themes will include the intersections of race, class, and gender; environmental justice; rethinking bioregionalism; urban environmental social movements; urban farming/gardening; brownfields; radical municipalism; tactical urbanism; transformative education; Afrofuturism; action research; and ideas of place, home and nature. The course will focus on the ethics and practice of community collaboration and community-based research in environmental work in urban settings. Students will work directly with community groups, developing relationships, and collaborating on research relevant to their efforts. As the course title indicates, the arts of collaboration—on multiple levels—are central to this course. Readings include: Joan Iverson Nassauer, Roger Sanjek, Peter Berg, Donald Schon, Anne Rademencher, Gregory Bateson, Jane Jacobs, Grace Lee Boggs Meredith Minkler, Baltimore Ecosystem Study, adrienne maree brown, Davydd Greenwod, Miles Horton; Eve Tuck, Kim Fortun, Julian Agyeman.

    ENVS 035/POLS 043B Environmental Justice: Theory and Action
    Giovanna DiChiro
    Wednesday/Friday: 12:10–2:55 p.m.

    An introduction to the history and theory of environmental justice, an interdisciplinary field that examines how inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, and gender shape how different groups of people are impacted by environmental problems and how they advocate for social and environmental change. This semester the course will be taught at the Philadelphia Friends Center and will concentrate on urban environmental justice issues and creative strategies for change in Philadelphia. Drawing on the work of scholars and activists from a wide variety of disciplines in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts &humanities, we critically examine the conceptual divisions between “nature and society,” “urban and rural,” and the“community and the planet.” We will analyze the history of the widely used concept of “sustainability” focusing on the diverse ways it has been embraced, transformed, and implemented in different cultural and urban contexts. We will investigate some of the challenges facing cities like Philadelphia as they implement sustainability initiatives and try to avoid “green gentrification” (sustainability improvements such as green buildings, eco-parks, and upscale farmers’ markets that increase property values, pricing out and displacing local, low-income residents). We will likewise explore the promise of urban areas as important centers for supporting the flourishing of diverse, equitable, and ecologically sustainable communities. Course incorporates a community-based learning component.

    MATH B295 Math Modeling and Sustainability
    Victor Donnay
    Monday/Friday: 10:10–11:30 a.m.
    Friday: 12:10–2:55 p.m.

    Taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, this course will use mathematical models to study issues of sustainability in the city. Examining energy consumption and the potential of using renewable energy to meet these needs, students will evaluate the effectiveness and associated costs -- social, environmental, financial -- of various technologies. As part of the course, students will work in teams to analyze a real-world sustainability issue of interest to a community partner. Prerequisites: MATH 102; MATH 118;  Calculus II;  MATH 025 and permission of instructor.

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  • Spring 2019

    Core Course

    ENGL H222B Philadelphia: Inventing a City
    Thomas Devaney
    Tuesdays/Thursdays, 10-11:30 a.m.

    It has been called the Quaker City, the City of Brotherly Love, home of the Lenni Lenape, City of Neighborhoods, City of Firsts, Workshop of the World, the Hidden City, and more. The city’s literary history and culture is rough and dark as it is rich and enlightened. From its patricians to its philistines, the course explores Philadelphia through a roster of writers, journalists, civic scribes, Quaker legerdemain, and pamphleteers who charted a number of cultural transformations. Discover how the asymmetrical evolution of Philadelphia, from the 1680’s to the present, has informed the character of the city and its diverse residents.

    The course is a combination of in-class lectures and discussion, and self-directed and class-led tours to cultural destinations throughout the city. Six to seven times during the semester, students will seek out new experiences in Philadelphia’s cultural community and visit, research and respond to what they’ve experienced. Course meets in Center City, Philadelphia.

    Elective Courses

    POLS H204B The Politics of the Creative Class in American Cities
    Stephen McGovern
    Tuesdays, 12-2:30 p.m.

    Explores the social, economic, and political impacts associated with the sizeable influx of college graduates into many urban areas during the past decade. Has the rise of this "creative class" in American cities fueled progressive reforms or exacerbated existing inequalities? Much of our analysis will focus on the influence of the creative class in the city and neighborhoods of Philadelphia. To that end, the course will be offered not on the Haverford campus but in Center City, Philadelphia.

    ENGL B216 Narrativity and Hip Hop
    Mecca Sullivan
    Thursdays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.

    This course explores narrative and poetic forms and themes in hip-hop culture. Through close, intensive analysis of hip hop lyrics, as well as audiovisual performance and visual art, we will consider how rappers and hip-hop artists from the late twentieth century onward have used the form to extend, further, and complicate key concerns of literature in general, and African American and African Diaspora literature in particular. We will explore key texts in hip hop from the late 1970s to the current moment. Reading these texts alongside short fiction by writers such as Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Victor LaValle, Kiese Laymon, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Regina Bradley and others, we will consider how themes of socioeconomic mobility, gender and sexuality, queer and feminist critique, and intersectional political engagement animate artists’ narrative and poetic strategies across genre and media.

    Written work will include regular in-class presentations, short creative assignments, three short papers, and a final project. As a part of the Philly program, the course will take place in Center City, Philadelphia. Along with course readings, we will engage directly with writers, artists, and events that help shape Philadelphia’s vibrant hip-hop and literature scene.

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