Tri-Co Philly Stories

How do the places we live and work shape our health? Why is life expectancy well over 80 years in some Philadelphia neighborhoods, but 64 in others? The interdisciplinary field of social epidemiology offers tools for answering these questions and many more.

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.

How have Black Philadelphians contended with public health crises and sought to redress racial health disparities? Together, we will explore this question and more to learn about the intergenerational struggles Black people have engaged in as they employed public health concepts and redressed gaps in government-supported public health initiatives over generations.

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.

This course introduces biostatistics through the public health and medical landscape of Philadelphia. We explore how data are used to understand health outcomes, evaluate interventions, and inform policy in urban settings.

This course will explore the ongoing and active Indigenous presence in Philadelphia, by examining the visual and material histories of Indigenous communities, artists, and leaders of present-day Philadelphia and its surrounding ancestral territories, from pre-contact to the present.

"Working with LITS and the Italian Department for this project was truly one of the highlights of my semester!"
— Eleanor Sullivan '27

"This program was created to connect students and faculty with the amazing experiences Philadelphia has to offer."   

This course will proceed from two basic assumptions: that the built environment, as a cultural product, is a rich archival record; and that architecture and urbanism are not born complete but made by people through discussion, debate, contingency, use, and reuse.

Philadelphia is a vibrant literary city - and one without a single, monolithic literary center of gravity. In this class, taught by novelist, poet, and Swarthmore Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, students will have a chance to get to know, and contribute to, Philadelphia's vibrant literary culture.

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.

This course investigates the history and evolution of Philadelphia as a globalized and multi-ethnic city, using as a case study for this analysis the impact and legacy of transnational Italian culture across the centuries.