Environmental Studies Stories

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.

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.

"Taking a GIS course exposed me to a skill that I didn't even know I wanted to learn, but ended up loving!" - Lucía Román Harter ‘26

This transdisciplinary and community-engaged course focuses on challenges of responding to extreme heat in Philadelphia. Site visits, guest speakers, readings, and community-driven research will deepen students’ understanding of the intertwined social, economic, health, and environmental challenges facing Philadelphia in a warming world.

This cluster uses multidisciplinary tools from language and culture, literature, and environmental science to reveal histories hidden in and around the city of Angoulême, France.

This cluster integrates literary, scientific, and policy perspectives to highlight both the complexity of climate change and the many innovative ideas being developed to address it worldwide.

This cluster focuses on the core issue of borderland encounters, and addresses a variety of common themes such as the concept and nature of borderlands, cultural exchange, power relations, ethnic experience, human- environmental interactions, and (trans)nationalism.

What comes in the wake of energy extraction? This cluster will examine the afterlives of coal, oil, and nuclear energy through the lenses of the arts, political science, and earth science.

Coastlines, by definition transitional environments, are naturally dynamic and resilient. But climate change, sea level rise and shifting species distributions are now causing rapid physical and ecological changes to the world’s coasts. Anticipating and addressing these changes requires understanding the physical, chemical and biological processes that interact at the land-sea boundary. (Taught 2014-15; 2017; 2020; 2024)