Conclusions

This chapter advances some closing reflections on how the book can contribute to existing public and academic discussions and praxis relating to music, leisure, forced migration, and sanctuary. The conclusions contend that while the leisure practices of people seeking asylum are never separate from harmful forms of migration management, they are not reducible to these frames. Addressing musicking and leisure as sites of intensity and articulation can thus complicate public and academic perspectives on asylum; from deficit frames that populate humanitarian and academic narratives, to ethno-populist portrayals of refugees as inherent threats to the nation, and perspectives that contain refugees within individualising discourses of empowerment and resilience. The chapter also considers the productivity of music as a form of ethnographic relationality that seeks possibilities “in which what moves” (Khan, Arc of the journeyman: Afghan migrants in England. University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 15): be it songs, sounds, people, things, stories, and ways of being-in-the-world that exceed existing modes of apprehension.