Mapping migration paths through the dwindling institutional diversity of Florida

Phan, L. D. H. and van Amstel, F. M. C. (2025). Mapping migration paths through the dwindling institutional diversity of Florida, in Sharma, A., Dey, S., Venkataraman, S., Khadilkar, P., Kar, G., Singh, S., and Tewari, S. (eds.), ICDHS14: Cultures of Design, 10–12 October 2025, at IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India

Abstract

Higher education institutions in the United States of America are known internationally for institutionalizing race, gender, sexuality, and nationality relations under the label of diversity programs and policies. In recent months, such programs and policies are being reverted and defunded in many of these institutions for being supposedly exclusionary towards white people. On one hand, dismantling institutional diversity reveals the institutional racism that it concealed. On the other hand, it reduces the already narrow resources available to confront institutional racism. How do international design students navigate this contradiction? This paper presents findings from a co-autoethnographic research on this dwindling institutional diversity in a graduate design program in Florida, where 77% of the students are immigrants from the Global South. Through a specific codesign experiment involving local news and an inverted world map, students reflected on their experience of racialization through educational migration and the role of institutional diversity in alleviating and concealing it.

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