Hmmm, I have many responses to this.
First, who at Parsons has any expertise to be teaching you zoo design?
Second, this paper is fine as a first draft to get your thinking down on paper. It is the easy part. Now you need to think harder, dig deeper, ask more difficult questions and get some real-world grounding.
The Museum field has been wrestling with their colonial foundations and assumptions for quite some time and much work has been done examining that and exploring how museums might rectify problems identified. Look into that and see what it adds to your thinking and what you have to add to the field
Find out how zoo design is actually done, who makes the decisions and how. You are mistaken that zoo design is mostly done by older white men. All of my women colleagues would see that as another man dismissing their efforts.
Know that decisions come from zoo directors, zoo boards , zoo curators and donors. Guest services staff, facilities management directors, development directors and even, on occasion, horticulturists participate.The designers work with them to deliver the product they want. If you want to see change in zoo design start with the people who have the power. Trust me, it is not the designer.
Consider how zoo design differs from other design fields. A publication may reinvent itself with each issue. A fashion house with each season. But when you are designing an exhibit that will take several years from design to opening and cost millions of dollars it is unrealistic to get too trendy. By the time that mega-project is open the zoo visitors whose opinions you solicited will all be spending their time at kid's soccer practice and will have let their zoo memberships lapse. And a $20million hippo exhibit cannot so easily be altered because the newly transferred animal prefers the shallower pool that the three other hippos use to the deeper one that is available.
You seem to accept the use of local cultural representations in exhibits of other regions but require that some representative of that culture (and who decides who speaks for us?) be consulted. Why do you accept this approach at all?
You suggest that designers pick which clients meet their ethical goals and refuse all other work. Do you have reason to believe that there is so much zoo design work out there that you can support a business in that way? Are your employees not also to be protected from furloughs and downsizing because you only find 1 ethically approved client every five years?
In fact, you show no understanding of how businesses survive financially. Neither zoo design firms nor zoos. Hours, admission price, concession prices, etc. get decided to fund the operation. You may push for more access but you can't simply pretend that funding doesn't matter. The Coronavirus shut-downs' effect on zoos should make it abundantly clear that without sufficient income zoos die.
I see you urge zoo designers to create outreach programs to work with those who cannot get transportation to the zoo. That is not part of a zoo designer's work. So you need to investigate what zoo designers actually do and what everyone else at the zoo does.
All of what you write about the zoo's community neglects the diversity of that group. Are we talking about visitors? Potential visitors? Neighbors? Within each of these large groups there is wide diversity of race, of education, of economic success, of ability, of national/cultural background. You cannot foster inclusivity by reducing "the community" to a faceless monolith. You are committing the same sin of which you accuse the zoo but with niftier verbiage.
If "the community" votes on which animals the zoo is to have then what becomes of in situ conservation? What becomes of conservation education at the zoo? Should school children decide whether or not they want to study math? Should the zoo be all lions all the time with no other animals because that it the local football team's mascot? Should an Arctic exploration vessel be named
Boaty McBoatface?
Now to inclusivity: have you looked into the moves zoos are making to better serve different audiences? AZA has a standing committee that looks at nothing else. Familiarize yourself with what is being done so that you may identify what still needs to be done and what the challenges are to realizing these goals. Or don't title this paper a survey. I agree with @Onychorhynchus coronatus that the use throughout the paper of the term "inclusivity" is confusing at best. You would do well to define what you mean and then focus on that if you want to talk about it at all
So... nice draft. All easy and superficial stuff. Now dig deeper, do your research and reflect on what you want to accomplish. And see if you can talk with Vik Dewan of the Philadelphia Zoo. He'll open your eyes to the very work you are interested in.
