Systems Salon

An online conversation hosted by the Transformative Studies Ph.D. program.

The upcoming winter Systems Salon is a one-hour, experiential Futures Salon designed to help you build the capacity to stay present, centered, and responsive in times of complexity and chaos.

Guided by Transformative Studies Ph.D. students Nancy Zamierowski, Lo Leighton, and Jeremy Tunnell, and hosted by Jennifer Wells, TSD faculty, this live session invites you to engage with systems, not as problems to solve, but as living, relational fields that are constantly engaging you in return.

Through grounded presencing practices — including nervous system–informed breathwork, embodied systems sensing, and reflective integration—you’ll explore how inquiry, attention, and the body’s wisdom can reveal patterns, tensions, and possibilities that thinking alone cannot access.

You’ll leave with simple, practical tools for sensing into self, community, and resources, strengthening your ability to navigate uncertainty with clarity, coherence, and care.

Meet the Host

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Jennifer Wells researches human ecology and social change. Her research aims at bringing uplifting and imaginative responses to the growing poly-crisis. She draws from the theoretical areas of complex thought, real utopian studies, and degrowth, and from leading Indigenous, BIPOC and Global South scholarship. Wells has degrees from Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Sorbonne, Paris IV. Since 2020, she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Sorbonne, Paris I, Center for Contemporary Philosophy and the Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences, in Paris, France. Currently, she is focused on a book project on discourse and praxis that shifts everyday thinking and worldviews towards a more complex and creative vision for the 21st Century. Her last book was the internationally recognized Complexity and Sustainability (Routledge 2014), on the contribution of complex thought to global sustainability. Her doctoral dissertation focused on complex thought and climate change (2009). She has done extensive public speaking, particularly in Paris and around the SF Bay Area and on the topics of applying systems and complex thought as well as imagination and creativity, to the climate crisis. Over her career, Wells has visited over 100 sites of ‘real utopias’ over four continents. She previously co-authored a book on the emerging biosciences, funded by and written for the Ford Foundation. After college, she worked for a few years as a writer at the United Nations Association and as Director of the Sustainability Education Center in New York, NY. She also helped to found and develop a writing and arts retreat center on an organic farm in Colebrook, Connecticut. Wells has a passion for new emergent sciences, humanities and arts, such as recent research in animal and plant intelligence and the environmental humanities.

Related Academic Program

Ph.D. in Transformative Studies