Focusing the convergences between migration and locality, the project moves away from seeing them as distinct. Instead, it seeks to understand how the places people inhabit together, the bonds they form with others (or the lack thereof), and the ways they envision and make sense of their own lives illuminate how the social fabric is being maintained and transformed. Doing so, the project promotes constructive debates on coexistence with the objective to contribute to the advent of more inclusive and sustainable societies.
Everyday coexistence
While the discussions on human coexistence in contemporary Europe often point towards increased differences and the emergence of new cleavages over identity, such debates, often carrying xenophobic undertones, fail to grasp what unfolds in everyday relationships. Against these understandings that create a dichotomy opposing identity and alterity, Co-Imagine proposes an approach focusing on everyday coexistence to unpack how everyday life emerges as a contested domain of continual negotiations and persisting tensions, where the living-together is at the same time already there and permanently reinvented.
Placemaking
Adopting a topological approach enables Co-Imagine grasping the relationships and creative strategies people mobilize to make the places they inhabit their home, but also the exclusory forces that push them into margins, physically or symbolically. Moving sideward toward geographically diverse research sites reveals how places are shaped by dense entanglements of relationships and differently impacted by global phenomena like migration or the policy-induced withdrawal of the state from the everyday. Through this focus on placemaking, co-Imagine explores how living together is continuously re-invented, in manifold local forms.
Temporalities
Co-Imagine also examines the relational and multiple nature of the temporalities and rhythms that shape human lives. Contemporary migration studies have criticized the artificial opposition between a “modern”, capitalist temporality governed by speed and a temporality of migration characterized by the suspension of time imposed by border and labor regulations. Instead, it is crucial to incorporate the idea of time as a continuous flow, in which the past is always transforming and merging with the present in an irreversible yet cumulative process. This allows to better understand the joint presence of dis-located and invisibilized memories and the creative usages of multiple temporal references in people’s existences.
In-betweenness
By studying how people live together in terms of everyday coexistence, Co-Imagine gives prominence to the “in-between”, that is, what joins people together and separates them from one another. In doing so, it shifts the attention away from centering on identities and migration-induced demographic transformations towards the inherently open and relational existential space that unfolds between the self and others, while taking note of the operation of power and hierarchies that shape what is in-between people.
Care
Various practices and structures of care are integral to everyday coexistence. Whether care surfaces in spontaneous, fleeting encounters, or is expressed in lasting social bonds, it is consubstantial of how people relate to each other, how they live together in particular places, and how they intersubjectively and affectively construct a sense of common emplacement there. Indeed, people don’t only care for other people or living creatures, they care for the places they inhabit as well. Furthermore, caring is part of the policy apparatus: Various public, not-for profit and private actors enact institutionalized forms of care that create and reflect societal power relations and hierarchies, which find themselves concretely materialized in these very practices. Besides (bio)political projects of ‘care’, various other policies such as regulations for family reunification also strongly influence how people can practice care in their everyday lives. Thus, including a general view of how care is regulated and enacted at different levels in the context of everyday coexistence offers an insightful perspective into the intricacies of how the social fabric is constantly recreated and maintained as people struggle to carve out a meaningful existence, at times amid difficult circumstances.
