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ProPEL Where Are My People? Queer in Architecture
Queer in Architecture chronicles both societal and discipline specific metrics in an effort to highlight the experiences of LGBTQIA+ designers, architects and educators.
Learn MoreEquity and Justice
Visit this page often to keep up to date with our data and research efforts,
or sign up for ACSA’s Friday e-newsletter to make sure you never miss a release.
Queer in Architecture: Beyond Binaries
Queer in Architecture "Beyond Binaries" is an essay intended to draw connections between queerness and built space. This thought-piece connects the work of LGBTQIA scholars to architecture and design by looking beyond the binary.
Learn MoreTravel Grants for Emerging Faculty
ACSA will offer eight travel grants to member school faculty seeking to attend an ACSA Administrators Conference and Annual Meeting conference in the 2024-2025 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).
Learn MoreACSA Justice
This website was created as part of the first ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture. The website went online in the Spring of 2024, initiated by Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia / WAI Architecture Think Tank, co-recipients of the fellowship, with the intent that the page is updated with scholarship, resources, and platforms that center questions and initiatives of social and ecological justice in architecture and related fields.
Learn MoreACSA Social Justice Shift
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is an architecture, non-profit association, leading and serving higher education. As such, we recognize the imperative to shift our focus from diversity to social and ecological justice.
Learn MoreACSA Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture
The ACSA invites applications for our one-year cohort of up to five Faculty Fellows to Advance Equity and Justice in Architecture. We seek faculty members to help extend the impact of ACSA’s ongoing work forefronting racial equity and climate justice through public programming, outreach, and partnerships.
Learn MoreACSA Transfer Toolkit: Best Practices for Facilitating Community College Transfer
This document is the outcome of work initially begun at the ACSA 2023 Convening to Advance Community College Transfer and Articulation in Architectural Education.
Learn MoreAcademy 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.
Learn MoreAIA/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.
Learn MoreACSA 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.
Learn MoreWhere 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.
Learn MoreWhere 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.
Read the ResearchOnline 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
Organizations
Publications
ACSA Data and Equity By Design
A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education
JAE Online Review of The Color of Law by Diane Jones Allen
Racial Equity and the Future of Work in TAD 4:1 Translation
Stay Safe From the Hate Booklet
Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto
What Will It Take?: Reflections on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Architectural Education in JAE 73:2 Work
‘DEI’ discourse in higher education could do more harm than good | Guest Commentary in The Baltimore Sun, Dec. 17, 2021
Extended Resources
ACSA108 Virtual Conference and ACSA/ASINEA Border Workshop
AIA Guides for Equitable Practice
Examining Whiteness: An Anti-Racism Curriculum
Less Talk | More Action – 2019 Fall Conference
NCARB Demographics: AXP and ARE
NCARB Demographics: Career and Licensure
Online Discussions and Webinars
The long history of racism against Asian Americans in the U.S.
TIMELINE: This is Canada’s history of anti-Asian racism that COVID-19 has amplified
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.
