For Ujima By Ujima: Troubling Voting, Citizenship, Democracy and Participation in 2020

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” — Preamble to the United States Constitution

The preamble, or enacting clause, to the United States Constitution offers intentions, promise and purpose for the founding of our nation. These words introduce the mechanisms through which the framers sought to ensure the blessing of liberty and establishment of justice, among other things, for all people.

For Ujima By Ujima is a multi-perspective look at participation and democracy writ large from an organization that concerns itself with democratic principles in practice.

What would it mean to look at the quality of our engagement with the United States, as if it were truly an experimental project?

What would happen if we viewed our country as a continually evolving concept rather than a fixed model?

How can we think through, and co-create new ways of engagement?

How do we understand power and governance through the ways it’s enacted today, both in the Ujima Project and within the United States?

Together, Ujima staff will reflect on our experiences and use the Ujima Project and the American Project as the lens through which we can compare and contrast citizenship and the performance of citizenship in 2020.

This conversation proposes liberation not as an end point, but as horizon, exercise, praxis.

“…[M]aking a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us” ― Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams

*Binaries like Voter/Nonvoter, Citizen/non-Citizen, Democrat/Republican, Valuable/surplus