School for Designing a Society

Visiting Instructors

Patch Adams M.D. - Social Change and Health Care

Patch Adams, medical doctor, clown, social activist and subject of the film "Patch Adams", is founder and director of the Gesundheit Institute, a holistic medical community based on the idea that we cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the community and of society. Patch Adams is also the author of Gesundheit, which chronicles his ideas about the U.S. health care system, and House Calls, a 'how-to' guide to giving care when visiting sick friends and family.

Current projects: expanding "clown diplomacy" by means of organized trips of non-professional clowns to refugee camps, shelters, checkpoints and other places where systemic violence has crushed the human spirit; creating five 2 hour professional films, to be shown on PBS, on the topic of "What Is Your Love Strategy?"

Ginevra Sanguigno - Performer and Activist

Ginevra Sanguigno has organized humanitarian clown groups all over Italy, bringing clowning into everyday life in railway stations, prisons, hospitals, malls, traffic. She has also organized trips to Argentina, Cambodia, Nepal with Clown One Italia, an organization she helped found. She teaches guerilla theater-clowning in Japan in the summer. She has studied with Dario Fo and Eugenio Barba. She has presented in Italy, United States, Japan, Cambodia, Cuba, Brasil, and has participated in humanitarian missions to Israel/Palestine, Ivory Coast, Romania, Afghanistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Peru, El Salvador, and Brazil.

Ginevra deserves much credit for organizing the Scuola per Projettare una Societa in Pruno, Italy in November 2007. We await an English edition of her book "the laughing body".

Publications:
Sanguigno, Ginevra. (2004.) Il corpo che ride - curare con il buonumore. Xenia Edizioni; Milano, Italia.

Maria Silva - Media Studies and Political Activism

Maria Isabel Silva, videotographer and activist, has extensively studied Archaeology, Anthropology, and Communications Research. She's worked as assistant director of La Casa Cultural Latina at UIUC. In Ecuador she created a community museum and founded and directed a non-profit organization to promote culture and indigenous eco-tourism. She involves people in using video and language as a means of creating their distinguishing self-descriptions. Currently, she is working on a documentary film about Mexican immigrant laborers as they work and live in Illinois, and back home in Mexico.

Silva is Editor-in-Cheif of El Informador, the new weekly Spanish language Newspaper in Urbana Champaign.

Robert Naiman - Political Economy

Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst and National Coordinator at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes a blog on Huffington Post.

Recent Writing
If Americans Knew What We Did to Iran, Would We Still Talk About Using Force? (Robert Naiman, 2/11/2008)
Four Thousand US Deaths Should Spark Congressional Debate (Robert Naiman, 3/25/2008)

Change of State Performance Project - Composition and Social Change

Change of State Performance Project is a collaboration between K. Qilo Matzen and Andrea del Moral. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2003, we have made or collaborated on eight dance, dance-theatre and theatre pieces. Change of State works annually with two-time Illinois Arts Council Fellowship recipient Lisa Fay, a choreographer based in Urbana, Illinois. In January 2006, Change of State partnered with San Francisco's CounterPULSE for fiscal sponsorship. We also produce other artists' work, raise money for grassroots organizations, and instigate community conversations around water-culture.

Recent Works include:
"Take This House (and Float It Away)" (2007)
"Tendency, or If You Kick a Dog", by Lisa Fay (2007)
"Shoestrings Attached" (2006)

Larry Richards - Cybernetics

Larry Richards is currently Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (organizer-coordinator-facilitator) at Indiana University East. Larry brings his administrative experience as founding chair of a department of engineering management (Old Dominion University), founding dean of a school management and aviation science (Bridgewater State College) and now chief academic officer of a small campus of a large research university (Indiana U.) to issues of organizing for social change. He holds degrees in electrical engineering (B.S.), aeronautical systems (M.S.), management (M.B.A.) and operations research (Ph.D.), with special interests in cybernetics, conversation, and the role of science, art and technology in social design and social transformation.

Richards has participated in the School for Designing a Society since its beginnings.

Selected Publications:
Richards, L.D. (2007.) Connecting Radical Constructivism to Social Transformation and Design. Constructivist Foundations 2(2-3): 129-135.
Richards, L.D. (1991.) Beyond Planning: Technological Support for a Desirable Society. Systemica 8(2): 113-124.

The Nonsense Company - Composition and Performance

The Nonsense Company, from San Diego, California, now based in Madison, Wisconsin, performs new and innovative works of contemporary music and theater, with an emphasis on the musical use of speech in estranged contexts and the application in theater of techniques more commonly associated with music. The Company's name is borrowed from Franz Schubert's ensemble, die Unsinn Gesellschaft, who with radically spare resources spawned a revolution in the music and poetry of the nineteenth century. The company's current members are Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gricevich, and Ryan Higgins.

Recent Works include:
Conversation Storm for three actors and tape (2006)
The Climb Up Mount Chimborazo for three actors, tape, and candles (2005)
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving for three speaking percussionists (2003)

Michael Brun - Political Economy

I discuss topics in political economy at the School for Designing a Society, have done so off and on since 1994. Otherwise I have taught at the University of Illinois, Illinois State University, and the University of Agriculture in Slovakia. Classes have included Comparative Economic Systems, Labor Economics, Economics of Women in the Labor Market, Micro- and Macroeconomics, Statistics.

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