This anthropological investigation specifically combines a perspective on gender and a focus on practices of coexistence. Coexistence is meant here as both the idea of sociality and a type of analyses able to interpret modes of shared experiences (Nowicka, Vertovec 2014) through the observation of concrete practices of conflict resolution and through a redefinition of dividing lines between groups.

Based on the analysis of several social experiments conducted by organisations in social, educational, institutional and informal contexts, this project aims to test the heuristic worth of such practices.

This study will be carried out through participatory observation of an organisation that brings together educational services for infants and shelters for mothers and their children, as well as an informal network of families which hold dinners for university students from various African countries. Research will focus on social networks which simplify and move beyond the work of institutions, thereby reconstructing various modes of coexistence. Simone (2004) extends the concept of infrastructure – the set of resources and possibilities for economic development in urban contexts – to persons able to assemble disparate objects, spaces and practices in order to react to processes of socioeconomic marginalization. Can the transaction of goods, ideas and projects of physical or social mobility – which will be examined here – aid us in identifying silent human “infrastructures” of coexistence? By means of an ethnographic analysis of several social networks, we will attempt to answer this question; we will seek to identify potential forms of social regeneration which struggle to emerge, precisely because they are connected to the “weak links” (Granovetter 1973) which pervade public spaces but which take form in domestic ones.