Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s aims and locates its analysis at the intersection of critical leisure and forced migration studies and urban geographies of asylum. The introduction positions the music group in relation to its wider urban and national context and amid a consolidated trend towards the exclusion of people seeking sanctuary from and within national borders in countries of the Global North. Building on this overview, the discussion examines key issues of ethnographic positionality and representation in the context of this work and the engagement with musicking as a method to skew the relationship between “subject” and “object” of the research and to register the productivity of the music space. In its conclusions, the chapter outlines the book’s structure and contributions vis-à-vis literature across leisure, forced migration, and urban geography.