Remaking Democracy: Systems Theory for Social Change
Sunday, October 18, 2026 | 12:00 PM EDT | 6:00 PM CEST | 12:00 AM China (Monday, October 19, 2026)
How can we empower our communities to make lasting social change? Come discuss how we remake democracy through universal participation.
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want is a guidebook for social change designed to teach dialectics and cybernetic concepts to organizers, and principles of organizing to cyberneticians. Drawing from second order cybernetics and Black feminism, the book advocates two-sided transformative change, in which the healing of self and society require each other. It teaches how to formulate problems as contradictions in order to find points of leverage where systems become vulnerable, and tells stories of successful interventions to illustrate how iterative action and reflection practices alchemize into heuristic change-making in the real world.
Participants Bios
Danielle Chynoweth is an organizer, elected official, and co-author of Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want. She serves as Cunningham Township Supervisor, Field Instructor at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, and Chair of the Champaign Continuum of Service Providers to the Homeless. Since 2017, Danielle has transformed the Township into a $6.5 million public agency, founding The Living Room crisis respite center, the Rental Assistance Consortium, Bridge to Home family shelter, and over 70 Solidarity Gardens.
Danielle previously served as Organizing Director at Media Justice. She led national campaigns to secure FCC prison phone rate caps, expand broadband, and pass the Local Community Radio Act. She co-founded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, spent 15 years as partner and Vice President at Pixo Tech, and served on the Urbana City Council (2001–2008), where she spearheaded affordable solar housing, police oversight, and the creation of the public arts program.
Since 1995, Danielle has taught globally with the School for Designing a Society. She holds an MA in Political Science from The New School and a BA from New College, and her honors include the Women Making Waves Award (2025) and McKinley Foundation Social Justice Award (2018). Her LinkedIn profile can be found here.
Elizabeth Adams, PhD, is a composer, teacher, and caregiver who has worked at the intersection of art, education, organizing and care for over twenty years. She is a knowledge worker intent on creating the cultural change that will support social justice. Her compositions use sound to invoke social and political metaphors, and have been performed throughout Europe and the United States.
Elizabeth produces anticapitalist music concerts with Julie Harting, created pop-up political education spaces with Free University NYC, and won historic rent laws with the Crown Heights Tenant Union. With the Orfeo Duo, she co-organized Songlines, a collaborative public mapping of over seventy blocks through songwriting and parade. She has taught at Columbia University and the School for Designing a Society. More about her work at Art To Think With.
The session will be moderated by jude lombardi and Larry Richards.
