New Ph.D. Program Focuses on City, Culture, Community

With a focus on a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, the new City, Culture and Community doctoral program at Tulane University is accepting its first applications.

The program was created with cooperation from the Department of Sociology, the School of Social Work and the Urban Studies program, along with participating faculty located in the School of Liberal Arts, School of Architecture, School of Law, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and School of Science and Engineering. The program's intellectual focus brings together approaches from each discipline.

“As a broad-based and integrative graduate education-research program, the CCC Ph.D. addresses interrelationships between the built environment and social, economic and political institutions and processes that shape urban areas,” says Charles Figley, program director and professor of social work. “This interdisciplinary approach will allow students considerable flexibility to develop their training to individual research interests.”

Students will be able to select dissertation topics, offering the potential for a cross-disciplinary approach with the doctoral degree awarded along tracks in social work, sociology and urban studies.

Joel A. Devine, professor of sociology and urban studies, says the first class, which will begin with six students in fall 2011, will reflect the program's distinctiveness.

“This degree will prepare students for research in a variety of settings, while taking advantage of Tulane's location in New Orleans at a critical moment in the region's social, cultural and infrastructural rebuilding,” Devine says.

Joseph Halm is marketing/communications coordinator for the Tulane School of Social Work.