Social isolation and loneliness are widely recognised as major factors affecting mental health. In such circumstances, forming connections in third places is essential. In Japan, cafés known as ‘community cafés’ prioritise social purposes over profit. My fieldwork focused on such cafés, which bring people together and foster a sense of belonging. Yet how do these cafés actually cultivate connections? While the owner’s role in serving coffee and meals and conversing with users is important, it is not the only one. This study aimed to clarify another crucial role. At community cafés, regular users engage in behaviours rarely observed in chain cafés. These include tending the garden, making flyers, playing the ukulele, and greeting other users. Why do they engage in such behaviours? These actions stem from respect for the owner, who operates the café for the benefit of the local community rather than personal gain. Regular users recognise this, and their respect translates into support. In short, their behaviour can be understood as 'caring' for both other users and the café itself. What effects arise from this dynamic? Through such caring behaviours, users build friendships and develop a sense of belonging. Caring for others ultimately becomes a way of caring for themselves. Community cafés thus function as spaces where users care for others and, in turn, for themselves. This is made possible by owners passionately creating and sustaining the space. The owner's foundational role is therefore to create a space where people can care for one another. The chain reaction of mutual care that emerges in community cafés offers hope for the future.

The places we inhabit in everyday life are imbued with normative properties that emerge from ongoing processes of negotiation as well as contestation. The importance of place-making as relational practice of shaping spaces we live in together is being acknowledged from a planning perspective as well as from the point of view of actors’ lived experience of the spatial properties of everyday life. Research in human geography, planning theory and urban development points to the implicit normativities of city infrastructure, architecture, and design as well as its political significance in structuring the potentialities for participation and (public) engagement. In that regard, place-making is intrinsically connected to relations of power, inequality and structures of inclusion/exclusion.

In our presentation we focus on the negative side of place-making by raising the question: What happens when agents reject implicit normativities of places. We argue that such instances imply that places no longer provide scaffolding for routines and habits agents experience as valuable dimension of their everyday life. Against the backdrop of experiences with eco-social transition projects in the city of Vienna, we discuss different modes of experiencing agents’ de-synchronization with places they live in (ranging from crises of attunement and a sense of (not) belonging to open resistance). From there we argue that having to bear places, continuously imposing normative constraints agents experience as unwarranted or outright ‘wrong’ may constitute a felt sense of injustice and may lead to strong feelings of (spatially dispersed) anger, resentment and ressentiment.

Amid ongoing transformations of welfare state institutions—marked by managerial governance and shifting normative expectations—family life emerges as a critical site for examining the intersection of social policy and everyday practice. This paper explores how care, upbringing, and participation are negotiated within families navigating institutional demands in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic and practice-research with children and parents, the analysis foregrounds the subjective meanings of structural conditions for everyday family life.

The presentation includes a Danish case study of an early childhood intervention targeting minority ethnic children and their parents. Termed the ‘mandatory learning programme’, this initiative exemplifies contemporary European policy efforts to enhance children’s future school performance and combat inequality. Through document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates how political representations of social problems are translated into everyday interventions—and how these interventions shape, and are shaped by, familial routines and relationships.

Findings reveal that while the programme aims to foster inclusion, it paradoxically risks reinforcing exclusion by placing demands that challenge parents’ ability to sustain engagement in education and employment. By theorizing the micropolitics of everyday life, the paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of how broader political and institutional dynamics materialize in daily conditions, and how familial narratives offer insight into contemporary configurations of welfare, responsibility, and social inclusion.

In India, the lifetime prevalence of mental health disorders is estimated at 13.7% of the general population, yet 70-92% of individuals with mental disorders never receive treatment. Most individuals with severe mental illness in India prefer to stay with their families. This preference has created a growing population of informal caregivers and leads to a significant caregiver burden. Additionally, there is a lack of research on the political, social, and structural barriers and opportunities of informal caregiving in India; more attention needs to be paid to this topic due to vast mental health treatment gaps and lack of support for caregivers.

The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the challenges, cultural understanding of caregiving, and political and social determinants of healthcare that are associated with informal caregiving in India. To facilitate this understanding, the arts-based approach called digital storytelling (DST) intervention which combines digital technologies for storytelling with voices of members of underrepresented communities in research will be employed with 10-12 informal caregivers in India. Over three days of the intervention, participants will design their own digital stories through selection of images relevant to their stories, writing scripts, and adding voiceover to their stories. After 6 months of the intervention, the DST process will be evaluated using follow-up interviews. This intervention will be analyzed using grounded theory and then themes/links will be generated to create a de novo theory. Lastly, a community advisory board will be formed to provide feedback through the research process.