This book analyses the negotiation of place, belonging and uncertainty enacted by a group of 60 men and women seeking asylum who gathered weekly in a community space in Bristol, UK, to share songs, memories, laughter, and precariousness with other established and new city-dwellers. Building on a rich corpus of ethnographic data, this book explores music-making to address “what goes unnoticed” in existing ways of thinking about forced migration.

By looking at the junctures where leisure, forced migration and urban analyses intersect with grassroot solidarity with and by people seeking asylum, it offers an interdisciplinary reading of music, forced migration and emplacement for scholars across leisure, anthropology, sociology, and geography. This book contributes and provokes novel discussions regarding refugees’ everyday experiences and negotiations of precariousness, suspension, and marginality in Britain.