What tools do we need to empower ourselves and our communities to create a more just and desirable future?We are at a watershed moment of rising fascism and rising seas. Yet, our ability to connect and collaborate in creating our societies has never been greater. The urgent question is: How do we build democratic participation everywhere?
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want is a guidebook for social change. It provides strategy and tools to create a more just and desirable future for everyone. It empowers people from all walks of life to analyze root causes of the problems we face and design actions, transforming ourselves as we transform the world. Stories of successful projects illuminate the book’s theory in action. Remaking Democracy teaches how to proliferate participation and grow democratic practices, so that those affected by systems can become their creators. It equips us to design the abundant variety of solutions our surviving and thriving require.
Preface by Dr. Safiya NobleIntroduction
1 What Time is it on the Clock of the World? Living in Contradiction
2 How to Make Change in Systems: The Spiral of Change
3 Champaign Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice: Organizing Against
Racialized Police Violence
Part I
4 Movements Begin with the Telling of Untold Stories
5 Gather to Share Stories
6 As violence is done to me, so violence is done to them
7 Whats Your Problem?
8 Formulating Problems and Looking Systems Together
9 Campaign for Prison Phone Justice: Storytelling to Confront Mass
Incarceration (Case Study)
Part II
10 Desire as Orientation: New Criteria for New Societies
11 Making Desire Statements
12 School for Designing a Society: Experiments in Education & Art (Case
Study)
Part III
13 Contradictions as Points of Leverage
14 Formulating Contradictions to Find Points of Leverage
15 Cunningham Township: Ending Homelessness in Your Hometown (Case Study)
Part IV
16 Designing Care for a Loved One (Case Study)
17 Beginning to Design: Essential Tools
18 Design Principles
19 Additional Design Tools
20 Designing Health Care Systems Intensives (Case Study)
Part V
21 The World is Always Being Made: Reflect, Learn, Revise, Repeat
22 Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center (Case Study)
23 When Your Project is a work of art and other domains
Afterward Further Provocation
Danielle Chynoweth is a local-to-national leader in the Media Justice and Housing Rights movements. As an elected public servant, she has designed alternative crisis response, family shelter, and Solidarity Gardens, and spearheaded public arts, community broadband, solar affordable housing, and police oversight. She was the Organizing Director for Media Justice and cofounded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. She teaches social change at the University of Illinois, the School for Designing a Society, and internationally.
Elizabeth Adams, PhD, is a composer, teacher, and caregiver, who has worked at the intersection of art, education, and organizing for over twenty years. As a knowledge worker intent on creating the cultural change that will support social justice, she co-instigated Julie & Elizabeths Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, and organized with the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Free University NYC, and What A Neighborhood! She has taught at Columbia University and the School for Designing a Society.
