Project Reconstitution: A Care-Centered Framework for Constitutional Renewal

CHICAGO - Nov. 19, 2025 - PRLog -- Independent scholar Melissa Cosgrove releases Project Reconstitution, a 35-page civic document offering a care-centered framework for rebuilding democratic integrity in the United States.

"The Constitution organized power but not responsibility," Cosgrove writes. "We find ourselves living within its failures; but we also live within the possibility of its repair."

Released as a care-centered civic counterpoint to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, Project Reconstitution reframes the present constitutional crisis as a rupture — a moment when hidden fractures become visible — and a necessary opportunity to rebuild governance on the principles of care, repair, and integrity.

"Care is not sentiment or charity. It is structural attention, the continuous tending that keeps coherence alive. When care becomes constitutional principle, governance transforms from control into stewardship."

The document is structured in seven sections, moving from diagnosis to prescription. It begins with a cultural reckoning ("We Are In Rupture") and proceeds to redefine the premises of governance, arguing that integrity, not control, should be the measure of political health. Later sections outline the practical implications of care-based governance across domains: law, economy, labor, education, family, environment, and health. The work concludes with a call for Collective Restorative Rupture, a nonviolent method of social transformation rooted in accountability, repair, and care.

Cosgrove developed the theoretical foundation for the document through her Dynamic Fractal Theorem of Relation (DFTR), which describes how systems — biological, social, and political — sustain themselves through patterns of rupture, repair, and care. Project Reconstitution applies this universal grammar to the American political project, contending that care is not sentiment but structure: the necessary condition for democracy's endurance.

Full text at:
https://projectreconstitution.org

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa Cosgrove is an independent scholar and writer based in Chicago whose work bridges philosophy, political theory, and care ethics. She is the creator of The Care Paradigm and the Dynamic Fractal Theorem of Relation (DFTR), which proposes that all systems persist through rupture, repair, and care. Her writing appears on The Care Paradigm Substack and in academic preprint archives including PhilArchive.

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