Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

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Academy for Public Scholarship on the Built Environment: Climate Action

ACSA is establishing an extended training opportunity for faculty to expand the impact of their research and scholarship beyond the academy. This opportunity is for architecture faculty, whose research intersects with climate action or climate justice, and is intended to help them impact conversations that affect everyone.
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Travel Grants for Emerging Faculty

ACSA will offer ten travel grants to member school faculty seeking to attend an ACSA Administrators Conference and Annual Meeting conference in the 2023-2024 academic year and who face obstacles to inclusion in architectural education. The grants of $2,000 USD each are intended to support emerging faculty who are from historically marginalized backgrounds—specifically, Black, native/indigenous, and Latinx faculty, as well as LGBTQ+ faculty and faculty teaching at institutions identified as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI).
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AIA/ACSA Equity in Architectural Education

Equity in Architectural Education provides actions and prompts intended to inspire discussions about creating welcoming environments to attract and retain those currently underrepresented in academia and in the profession. This resource defines the concept of culture in architectural education while describing impacts in the workforce. Equity in Architectural Education deepens the understanding of architecture education culture for anyone involved with it, students or professionals.
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ACSA Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture

The ACSA invites applications for our inaugural one-year Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture. We seek a faculty member to help extend the impact of ACSA’s work on racial equity and climate action through public programming, outreach, and partnerships.
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ACSA Architecture and Equity Course List

In response to recent events highlighting racial inequity across the United States, many institutions have added new courses that investigate the intersection of race, equity, social justice and the built environment. View the list.
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Where Are My People? Middle Eastern and North African in Architecture

The last piece in the series, Where Are My People? Middle Eastern and North African, covers a group of people who continue to face mass discrimination and combat popular misconceptions about heritage and religion.
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Where Are My People? Native and Indigenous in Architecture

Where Are My People? Native & Indigenous in Architecture chronicles both societal and discipline-specific metrics in an effort to highlight the experiences of designers, architects and educators of Native & Indigenous heritage.
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Where Are My People? Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander in Architecture

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander in Architecture chronicles both societal and discipline specific metrics in an effort to highlight the experiences of designers, architects and educators of Asian, Hawaiian and Pacific Island heritage.
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Where Are My People? Hispanic and Latinx in Architecture

Hispanic and Latinx in Architecture chronicles both societal and discipline specific metrics in an effort to highlight the experiences of Hispanic and Latinx designers, architects and educators.
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Where Are My People? Black in Architecture

Inspired by the data visualizations created by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1900, the first research report in the series, Black in Architecture, highlights metrics to help both the profession and the academy understand what it means to navigate architecture as a Black person.
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Where Are the Women? Measuring Progress on Gender in Architecture

The farther up you look in the world of architecture, the fewer women you see. We’ve rounded up some publicly available metrics behind this claim, in order to examine them more closely.
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Moving Towards an Equitable Future

This is the 2017-18 report of the ACSA Education Committee. The committee leads ACSA’s efforts to improve the effectiveness of architectural education through best practices.
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Online Events

Dark Matter University: Lessons in Anti-Racist Design Pedagogy

In this session, members of the DMU collective will share one year’s worth of teaching experiences and efforts bringing new design education models to academic institutions all over the U.S. and Canada to better acknowledge and address the structural legacies of racial injustice. The courses that will be presented vary from introductory courses, to advanced seminars, to design studios. Unifying these efforts is a commitment to collectivity: each course is taught by at least two educators and experiments with cross-institutional, transdisciplinary learning environments that advocate for expanded criteria for success.

Advancing Scholarship on Equity and Justice across the Built Environment

This online discussion examines ACSA’s contributions to the past decade of research and creative practice that advances scholarship on equity and justice in built environments. A panel of ACSA Research & Scholarship Committee members will present preliminary findings from its review of ACSA publications, activities, and a survey of ACSA members, followed by dialog among participants.

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Providing an Equitable Architectural Education

As educators, our mission is to ensure that every student can succeed. As a discipline, architecture often prioritizes the “product,” and the “place” before considering the “people”. This lecture will share the theoretical framework originally established by Gloria Ladson-Billings in her efforts to reach students from diverse backgrounds, and the tangible strategies necessary for validating students’ voices. By developing a socio-political consciousness, Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) empowers faculty to engage students in ways that architects should engage the public.

Perspectives on Power Dynamics and Racial Equity in Architecture

This online panel is a discussion that includes professional, academic, and student perspectives that will examine the experiences of architecture students and faculty specifically related to the topic of “Power Dynamics and Racial Equity in Architecture”. The discussion will begin with panelist experiences that inform their understanding of the advancement of racial equity. Topics of power dynamics and gaps in knowledge that influence inclusion will be explored in relation to power dynamics within architectural education and the profession that need to be re-examined with relation to racial equity.

Define & Design the New Normal: FACULTY DIVERSITY & EXCELLENCE

This webinar seeks to unearth and address implicit assumptions and expectations in current faculty hiring practices, and to consider what characteristics and experiences are privileged by the application of these measures in order to more directly apply a diversity-minded approach to defining excellence. In the context of today’s changes, challenges, and opportunities in teaching, the panelists will present and explore innovative new practices which seek to diversify the profile of an architectural faculty.

Culture Change in Architectural Education

Students and faculty alike are calling for architecture schools to be more inclusive and equitable, particularly for women and/or BIPOC students. This session will feature students and faculty engaged in change processes, both tangible (i.e., curriculum, teaching/learning culture policies) and intangible (i.e., unwritten practices and cultural conditions). Speakers will give brief presentations followed by breakout discussions about the building blocks for teaching/learning culture. All participants are welcome to discuss their challenges and successes.

Developing Policies and Shifting Operations for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

This panel will share best practices to promote social equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at schools of architecture. What steps might schools take to develop and assess impactful and measurable EDI policies? What tools can schools and departments use to measure the increased awareness of, access to, retention in, and successful graduation from architecture programs for minority students? Participation in this workshop will jumpstart a program’s efforts to develop an EDI policy and imagine ways to respond to the 2020 National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) Conditions and Procedures.

Other Helpful Resources

Submit Resource

We invite each of you to submit current coursework from any level of the curriculum, in any program, on any topic—studio, seminar, or lecture; design or research; foreign or domestic study.