Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want
with Danielle Chynoweth & Elizabeth Adams
in conversation Teresa Basilio Gaztambide and Esteban Giron
and performance by Margaret Lancaster
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 (Common Notions) 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.
Join authors Danielle Chynoweth and Elizabeth Adams in conversation with veteran organizers Teresa Basilio Gaztambide (Media Justice) and Esteban Giron (Crown Heights Tenant Union, Tenants PAC) and multi-hyphenate performance artist Margaret Lancaster performing pieces by Susan Parenti, Mark Enslin, Larry Polansky and Elizabeth Adams.
ABOUT THE BOOK
An accessible and practical resource, Remaking Democracy braids theory, assignments, and stories of successful interventions to teach you how to leverage your expertise into a strategy for making social change in your work, organizing, school, or faith life.
Drawing from race and gender justice, radical education, and experimental art, Remaking Democracy invites your participation in creating the abundant worlds we want. It tells the story of interconnected local to global projects in media justice, housing rights, abolition, education, health care, and healing.
Our participation is our power.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND PRESENTERS
Danielle Chynoweth is a media justice and housing rights leader who organizes with impacted residents to build power through strategic interventions that grow healing and hope. She works to end homelessness as an elected official. She was the Organizing Director for Media Justice and co-founded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. She teaches at the University of Illinois, 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. She produces anti-capitalist music concerts, created pop-up political education spaces with Free University NYC, and won historic rent laws with the Crown Heights Tenant Union. She has taught at Columbia University and the School for Designing a Society.
Teresa Basilio Gaztambide is the Senior Political Education Director at MediaJustice creating programming, curriculum and tools to advance our ability to understand and respond to the media and technology systems today. She is a native of Puerto Rico, and a proud Brooklyn resident since 1996. Teresa was the Deputy Director of the Resilient Communities Program at New America, and as Co-Executive Director of Global Action Project (GAP), a nationally recognized social justice youth media organizations with a mission to work with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed for community power, cultural expression, and political change. Teresa is also working on her first feature documentary “Everybody Wants a Revolution,” tracing the history of the U.S. branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party through the lives of those who were radically changed through their participation.
Esteban Giron is a recognized leader in the tenant movement at the level of his building, neighborhood, city, state, and nationally. A long-haul organizer with the Crown Heights Tenant Movement, Tenants PAC, and the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, he was honored in 2025 by the Met Council on Housing with their Jane Wood Award for the strategy, courage, skills, and labor of his movement contributions. You can often find him supporting fellow tenants in Brooklyn Housing Court.
“New-music luminary” (The New York Times) and multi-hyphenate creative, Margaret Lancaster (flutist/performance artist/actor/dancer/amiteur furniture designer) has built a large repertoire of cross-disciplinary solo and installation works that employ electronics and mixed media. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, MoMA, Art Basel/Miami, Santa Fe New Music, NIME/Copenhagen, and the 7-year global run of OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse (Helene). A member of Either/Or, Ensemble Ipse, Ghost Ensemble, and One System, guest appearances include Argento and the New York Philharmonic. Lancaster is passionate about collaborating, spontaneous dance parties, and cellophane. www.margaretlancaster.com