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Equity and Justice

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ACSA / DPACSA Faculty Mentoring Program

In fall 2025, ACSA and its College of Distinguished Professors (DPACSA) launched the new Faculty Mentoring Program. The goal of the program is to help faculty develop mentoring relationships based on their needs, in contrast to the ways in which many departments to assign senior faculty as mentors of new faculty, with promotion and tenure primarily in mind.
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Travel Grants for Emerging Faculty

ACSA will offer eight conference travel grants to member school faculty who face obstacles to inclusion in architectural education. The grants will support qualified faculty seeking to attend the ACSA Administrators Conference, November 6-8, 2025, in Fayetteville, AR, or the ACSA114 Annual Meeting, March 26-28, 2026, in Chicago, IL.
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Where Are My People? Disability in Architecture

Disability in Architecture chronicles both societal and discipline specific metrics in an effort to highlight the experiences of designers, architects and educators with disabilities.
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Academy for Public Scholarship on the Built Environment: Housing Equity

ACSA has established an extended training opportunity for faculty to expand the outreach and impact of their research and scholarship on housing equity. Housing equity ensures fair access to safe, affordable, and inclusive housing, and architects can advance the cause by articulating critical links between design, social justice, and community well-being.
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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.
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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.
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ACSA 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.
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ACSA 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.
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ACSA 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.
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ACSA 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.
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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 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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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

Organizations

Dark Matter University

Directory of African American Architects

Diversity and the AIA

National Organization of Minority Architects

Publications

ACSA Data and Equity By Design

A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education

Architectures of Vigilantism

JAE Online Review of The Color of Law by Diane Jones Allen

JAE 74:2 Othering

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

Racial Equity Tools

Stand Against Hatred

Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Site

The 1619 Project

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

U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division

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