Pittsburgh Neighborhoods is a course where students learn about people, culture, history, and current issues that confront under-represented communities and neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Throughout the semester, with direction from the instructor, students learn about and employ ways to see, document, and interpret a neighborhood by engaging the built environment, historical documents, and community members in storytelling. They approach the built environment as a cultural product, explore place as a fusion of material culture and human perceptions and practices, and frame questions of power around the politics of the built environment. In this class, we will employ methods that help us transcend the realm of the visual and explore the experiential and ephemeral. We will learn to observe with all our senses, listen to community members, and document life when in the field, and excavate and explore visual and textual records when in the archive. In doing so, we will adopt theories and methodologies from multiple fields, including urban/architectural history, cultural geography, anthropology, public history, and material culture studies
