Tri-Co Philly: Ecologies of Cooperation: Modeling Participation and Ecological Practice Through Philadelphia-Based Arts, Culture, and Environmental Co-Operatives

ENVS/VIST H317A | Monday, 12:15-3:00

Dylan Gauthier, Haverford College

Ecologies of Cooperation is an interdisciplinary TriCo Philly course that explores how visual arts, the humanities, and cooperative organizing shape contemporary ecological thought and practice in an urban context. Students will engage directly with Philadelphia’s networks of artist-run organizations, cooperative businesses, community gardens, and mutual aid formations to investigate how environmental awareness, care, and stewardship is not only represented, but actively reproduced and continually renewed through participatory, emergent, and collective practices.
Philadelphia is a rich terrain for studying and practicing the social production of ecological thought and action. Through readings, expert guest and site visits, cooperative engagements, and arts-based research, students will immerse themselves in the living networks of people, places, and practices shaping the city’s environmental future(s).

Combining seminar discussion with field-based research in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, students will draw on environmental humanities, political ecology, social practice art, and urban studies to analyze how collective structures emerge, endure, and transform. The city will serve as our primary text, offering grounded examples of how shared ownership, collective decision-making, and cultural production can help imagine more just and resilient ways of living together in a time of environmental precarity. This course will be taught in Philadelphia.