The Refugee and Migration Network Seminar showcased Dr Nicola De Martini Ugolotti’s research paper ‘Here to play: Music-making and forced migrants’ embodied practices of diasporic belonging in Bristol, United Kingdom’.
The seminar explored the negotiation of place, belonging and precariousness enacted by a group of about 60 refugee women and men who have gathered weekly for 18 months in a community space in Bristol to share songs, memories, ambitions, laughter and precariousness.
Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, images and poetry, Dr De Martini Ugolotti’s paper examines how and to what extent the embodied, effective and collective engagement with music-making enabled the group participants to navigate, (en)counter and interrogate the established scripts and ‘truths’ of asylum in Britain while addressing exile, destitution and uncertainty in their everyday lives.
Dr De Martini Ugolotti discussed how and why the paper highlights the significance of recognising the multiple and (in)visible forms of sociality that forced migrants to enact beside the discursive and institutional frames of state and humanitarian intervention/regulation, as a way to advance relevant scholarly analysis and on-the-ground approaches to migration and sanctuary.
