Designing Migration Equity
Summer Course 2021
Carnegie Mellon University
M/W 12:30-1:50
Mix of Synchronous and Asynchronous
Sign up to register here no later than May 7, 2021
Learn more about all 99-520 courses available tuition free to undergraduate students at CMU
Contact: Erica Dorn edorn@andrew.cmu.edu
We live in an era of hyper-mobility, marked by the mass movement of people virtually, trans-locally and globally. Yet many systems of governance are increasingly designed around fixity and separation, materializing systems that do not include and adapt to the increasing numbers of people on the move. For the kinetic elite, borders are thresholds of access, while for a growing number of displaced people, borders represent inhumane exclusion.
Students in this course will be transition design co-researchers. First working individually using a toolkit of research methods, students will investigate existing policies, interventions, and designs for more open border systems from around the globe. Working collaboratively, students as co-researchers in the course will develop a networked visualization and open-source catalogue of the formal and informal landscape of open borders. Acting as co-designers, students will analyze the findings to discern patterns and finally design interventions to support migration equity.
Students and transition design co-researchers in this course will:
Review and discuss existing research and knowledge related to open borders and migration equity
Apply research and design methods to conduct investigations of formal and informal migration equity interventions
Participate in a collective futuring exercise
Design a culture or policy intervention towards migration equity
Students who complete this course are credited as co-authors of the Civic Mobility project that is part of the Alfred Landecker Foundation and Humanity in Action Democracy Fellowship. Students will have generated a design for migration equity that can be exhibited as a research portfolio piece.
Each week there are required readings and prompts and students are required to submit brief research written reflections. Following the initial phase of research, students will sign up for a design role with corresponding milestones. The Monday session of the course will be asynchronous and the Wednesday session will be synchronous. Each assignment in the course builds on the previous assignment and students are given flexibility to engage with the research and course requirements in ways that most interest them and contribute to the collective research process and outcomes.
We will ask and respond to some of the following questions -
What are existing formal and informal policies, interventions, and designs that support people in the move?
Where do we see the future of the free movement of people in the present?
What would the future look like if citizenship as we know it were abolished?
What interventions and policies could be designed for migration equity?
Instructor Bio:
Erica Dorn
Erica Dorn is a Humanity in Action and Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellow and doctoral researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work focuses on how a growing number of people on the move connect to a sense of place and participate in civic life.
Prior to beginning her PhD, she led an extensive career in local economic development, social impact investing, business and leadership education, and experience design. In 2015, she co-founded etsy.org and served as the Managing Director of the non-profit it incubated, Good Work Institute, where she designed and led a first-of-its-kind bioregional leadership program in New York’s Hudson Valley. She consults and facilitates organizations in relational and living systems approaches to community and economic development.She lectures and leads workshops including at the City University of New York (CUNY), School of Visual Arts (SVA), Colombian Chamber of Commerce, among many others.
She is a co-creator of the spanish bi-lingual podcast, Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición, a podcast about plural notions of world-making towards just futures. She serves as Board of Directors for Third Millennium Alliance, an organization that’s working with local communities to preserve the last remnants of coastal Ecuadorian rainforest. She lives in Portland, OR with her husband, an architect and builder committed to addressing the housing crisis in the US, and their son, Octavio.
