FAJI will support two teams investigating the challenges social movements and left political formations face not only in winning governing power, but also in navigating and exercising that power in urban spaces once in office. At a moment when national political attention is increasingly focused on the 2028 federal elections and the question of who will govern in 2029, this project centers municipal government as a critical site of political strategy. Teams will critically study key experiments, including the eight-year administration of Barcelona en Comú / Ada Colau, the Workers’ Party’s fifteen-year governance of Porto Alegre, and the recent electoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, as well as the work of Cooperation Jackson. In keeping with SSJ’s focus on the University as a site of struggle, we are particularly interested in teams that can address the role of the University– as institutions that both anchor and extract from urban environments and as a site of research and scholarship that can advance and build radical municipalism.

Teams will examine the possibilities and limits of radical municipalism as a strategy for building governing power, countering rising authoritarianism, and advancing transformative political agendas. They will also analyze how universities function as corporate actors in urban centers and explore how municipalist approaches can support more equitable, anti-colonial alternatives. The project seeks to understand how municipal governance can strengthen social movements, expand radical democratic participation, and create material and political conditions that make liberation more possible.