How daily life impacts social science

Abstract

I would like to put forward my point of view as a French researcher on my Portuguese field of research (Mouraria/Lisbon). This reflection is thus the fruit of a back and forth between frequently used social science concepts – gentrification, fragmentation and segregation – and my own field experience. More precisely, I seek to understand why a gap exists between what we observed and these concepts. My hypothesis is that one possible answer lies in a conflict of temporalities: those of institutions and public organisations, those of companies, those of researchers and, finally, those of individuals who fall outside the previous categories. Starting with the latter, I approach the concept of daily life as a relationship between time and space, which is part of a process of remoteness based on the minimisation of risk as envisaged by Heideggerians. This tendency towards spatio-temporal proximity often contradicts our theoretical concepts. Keywords - Temporalities, spatialities, concepts, spatial being, daily life.