ABSTRACT
The chapter proposes a thematic overview of the everyday as an empirically grounded epistemological horizon to rethink coexistence. Contrary to the language of identity, which often fails to grasp the complexity and ambivalence that unfold in daily relationships, thinking with the everyday reveals how coexistence emerges as a contested domain of continual negotiations and persisting tensions, where the living together is already there and permanently reinvented. Building on discussions in anthropology, urban studies, migration research, and social theory, the chapter details how, far from being simply a synonym for mundane, the everyday opens an analytical lens that reconnects people’s experiences and subjectivities with the power dynamics that inform the socio-economic and political contexts in which they unfold. It does so by reintroducing the emplaced, dense entanglements of lives while also fostering a fleeting and pluralistic understanding of temporality, as suggested by Guillaume and Huysmans. This reconceptualized epistemological standpoint shifts attention towards the inherently open and relational existential space between the self and others, moving the study of living together away from essentializing debates over identity.
