Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture

Catalog description

This seminar confronts the ethical imperatives of architectural practice within the intersecting crises of climate collapse, technological acceleration, and systemic injustice. Anchored in Carnegie Mellon's pedagogical ethos of critical praxis, the course reconceives design not as a neutral exercise in problem-solving, but as a deeply political and philosophical act—one that implicates the architect in broader struggles over power, subjectivity, and the conditions of collective life. We examine architecture's operative capacity across multiple registers: from planetary systems of resource extraction, displacement, and ecological vulnerability, to the intimate geographies of race, gender, ability, and the right to bodily presence in space. Drawing from contemporary critical theory, decolonial thought, and social philosophy, the course constructs a conceptual scaffolding through which to interrogate the spatial logics of injustice and the emancipatory potentials of design. Through case-based inquiry into housing justice, algorithmic governance, speculative resilience infrastructures, and insurgent public space, students engage in a sustained investigation of architecture's entanglements with violence and its possibilities for repair. Special attention is given to frameworks of disability justice, queer and feminist spatial practices, and climate futurisms that center marginalized epistemologies and material needs. Rather than treating ethics as an external constraint, this seminar invites students to reimagine it as a generative design methodology—an active, situated, and collective mode of world-making grounded in care, accountability, and transformation.