Pacing Time and Treading Water: Music, Rhythms of Endurance, and Activist Affordances

This chapter examines how immobility, temporariness, and waiting were differently lived and tentatively redefined by the men and women in the music group amid state-enforced procedures employing time as a necropolitical tool of deterrence. From these perspectives, the chapter addresses how making, listening, and moving to music were central in the participants’ attempts to make waiting an act (Khosravi, S., Migration: A COMPAS anthology. COMPAS, 2014) as they struggled to make the trapped conditions of their present habitable. The chapter then turns to interrogate recent “re-imaginings” of leisure in the twenty-first century as “an art of living” (Blackshaw, T., Re-imagining leisure studies. Routledge, 2017) through a perspective that draws on the work of critical disability scholar Arseli Dokumaci to conceptualise leisure as “acts and arts of survival in a shrinking world” (x). Through such a dialogue, the chapter discusses leisure conceptualisations that can illuminate key omissions in contemporary leisure theories while probing new ways to engage with the temporary, unnoticed, yet existing possibilities of “world-making” amid lives lived in a state of injury.