Leisure and Forced Migration

Lives Lived in Asylum Systems

Nicola De Martini Ugolotti, Jayne Caudwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a timely and critical exploration of leisure and forced migration from multiple disciplinary perspectives, spanning sociology, gender studies, migration studies and anthropology. It engages with perspectives and experiences that unsettle and oppose dehumanising and infantilising binaries surrounding forced migrants in contemporary society.

The book presents cutting edge research addressing three inter-related themes: spaces and temporalities; displaced bodies and intersecting inequalities; voices, praxis and (self)representation. Drawing on and expanding critical leisure studies perspectives on class, gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity, the book spotlights leisure and how it can interrogate and challenge dominant narratives, practices and assumptions on forced migration and lives lived in asylum systems. Furthermore, it contributes to current debates on the scope, relevance and aims of leisure studies within the present, unfolding global scenario.

This is an important resource for students and scholars across leisure, sport, gender, sociology, anthropology and migration studies. It is also a valuable read for practitioners, advocates and community organisers addressing issues of forced migration and sanctuary.

Chapter 1

Leisure and forced migration

Lives lived in asylum systems

Nicola De Martini Ugolotti and Jayne Caudwell

DOI: 0.4324/9780429341045-1

Introduction

The events that marked 2020 have illuminated with devastating clarity the connectedness of the world(s) we live in, as a global pandemic, prospects of economic collapse, climate calamities and civil unrest feed into each other with yet-to-be known impacts and consequences. As if to underline these entanglements, the (in)capacity to breath has become a political, embodied and historical semantic that signals domains usually perceived as separated (Beneduce, 2020). The health inequalities exacerbated by COVID-19, the devastating impacts of air pollution and unprecedented wildfires, the deadly consequences of entrenched racisms and police brutality, and the suffocating precariousness of lives lived in asylum systems¹ all represent substantial examples of the ways in which “the universal right to breath” (Mbembe, 2020) has been breached by violence and injustice, before and during the pandemic.

Yet, in the past months the domains of leisure and forced migration seemed to belong and relate to different and separated life-worlds. During extended lockdowns, leisure practices increasingly emerged as life-affirming, though unequally accessible, domains for home-bound populations (Mowatt, 2020; Fullagar and Pavlidis, 2020). However, in the same timeframe, State procedures put in place to manage migration flows intensified their attempts to deny the possibility of life itself for people seeking asylum. Despite being increasingly common before the pandemic, non-assistance at sea, unlawful refoulement to death and torture, confinement in overcrowded camps and detention centres, and abandonment to hunger and destitution became seemingly legitimate practices of migration management amid the COVID-19 crisis (Meer and Vilegas, 2020). Even more starkly, the intensification of harmful practices of migration management during the pandemic were met by a deafening lack of public concern beyond human rights circles, all amid widespread claims that “we are in this together” (De Martini Ugolotti, 2020a).

Writing about leisure and forced migration in this time urges us to consider the disjunctions in the cultural and public narratives of the pandemic as revealing lenses of an increasing public and political consensus regarding whose lives are worth less² amid recurring “crises” (in sparse and overlapping order: economic, terror, migration, health). Concurrently, writing about leisure and forced migration in this time requires us to highlight how the relevance, meanings and experiences of leisure for people seeking asylum cannot be disentangled from intersecting forms of emboldened nationalisms and xenophobia, deadly State and border policies, and skewed public narratives.

Unfortunately, despite an increasing scholarly interest in refugees’ leisure practices in the last three decades, the analytical lenses and research questions informing this body of research have been remarkably narrow. As Lewis (2015) noted, most of the research on the topic has centred on functionalist and policy-driven themes and questions, such as the role that leisure can play in refugees’ integration into host countries, in fostering community cohesion, and with regard to (mental) health and well-being (see Amara et al., 2004; Stack and Iwasaki, 2009; Quirke, 2015; Whitley et al., 2016; Hurly and Walker, 2018; Hurly, 2019; Cain et al., 2020). At present, and although well-intentioned, much of the research on the topic has unwittingly replicated narrow framings of refugee populations in public and policy domains, either by uncritically reflecting skewed concerns of (forced) migrants’ integration vs. segregation, and/or by reproducing simplistic binaries between a “longed-for homeland” and an unfamiliar country of exile (see Lewis, 2010).

Building on what Malkki (1995) and Bakewell (2008) argued in the field of refugee studies, the tendency to centre research on policy-driven themes and questions has some substantial political and epistemological implications for scholars engaging with these topics. Studies arising too closely from policy-driven themes and buzzwords (e.g. community cohesion) can end up producing short-term answers to limited questions. Additionally, this tendency can make critical questions and wider issues that sit outside of immediate policy-makers and practitioners’ concerns “irrelevant”, and therefore invisible in academic and public debates. In this sense, studies that discussed leisure and refugees’ integration in re-settlement countries have rarely³ addressed the increasing assimilationist turn surrounding the term in policy domains; nor have they unpacked how policies—which insist on refugees’ responsibility to integrate—operate to transfer societal problems, such as unemployment and poverty, onto newcomers (Uheling, 2015). Relatedly, discussions of leisure and refugees’ inclusion, and community cohesion in contexts of resettlement, seldom problematise policy-makers and academics’ perspectives that frame social tensions and divisions as coming from beyond State borders, rather than, for instance, coming from persisting social and economic inequalities (see Lewis, 2010).

Finally, studies that address leisure in relation to refugees’ health and well-being often assume experiences of trauma and acculturation stress as intrinsic to an essentialised “refugee experience”⁴ (Malkki, 1995, p. 508). Such contributions fail to acknowledge the well-documented role of asylum policies, processes and spaces in shaping forced migrants’ access and opportunities for health, well-being and sociality (Fassin, 2005; Canning, 2019; Mayblin, 2020). Taken overall, and apart from notable exceptions,⁵ the growing scholarly attention towards refugees’ leisure practices has consistently failed to position these domains in relation to essentialising humanitarian narratives and State-sanctioned attempts to dehumanise and exclude forced migrants from (and within) national borders. In other words, scholarship on leisure and forced migration has often unwittingly contributed to narratives that constructed refugees as a “kind of person” (Malkki, 1995, p. 513): traumatised, lacking or needing to “integrate”. At the same time, leisure scholars often fail to recognise the (bio)political and moral construction of refugeness, and forget to acknowledge how necropolitical forms of migration management⁶ impact and shape the experiences, meanings, needs and access to leisure for people seeking asylum. As a result, explorations of refugees’ leisure practices have often enabled the leaching out of political histories and processes that have shaped refugees’ lives and subjectivities through a seamless continuum of “paternalistic humanitarianism, bureaucratic violence, and compassionate repression” (Beneduce, 2015, p. 560).

All of the above points invite a much more critical examination of the role that leisure can have in contributing to, or challenging, the reproduction of assumptions, narratives and practices that shape the lives and trajectories of people seeking asylum. In responding to the omissions and shortcomings of scholarship, and in addressing the nexus of leisure and forced migration, this book has two main aims. The first is to showcase and call for a closer engagement between leisure scholarship and critical, inter-disciplinary perspectives of forced migration. The second is to foreground the relevance of a critical focus of forced migration for leisure studies more widely. We contend that this engagement is long overdue, as well-known discussions of leisure in contemporary societies (Rojek, 2010; Blackshaw, 2016) have so far failed to articulate leisure theories and perspectives to the issue of forced migration, which is (re)shaping definitions of identity, citizenship, belonging, rights and, ultimately, humanity in our historical present.⁷

Such a critical engagement with the leisure–forced-migration nexus aims to meaningfully contribute to current debates on the scope, relevance and aims of leisure studies within current, unfolding global scenarios. In doing so, this focus highlights and expands crucial perspectives of leisure as a contested domain where power, knowledge, subjectivity, belonging and marginality are constantly negotiated along the intersecting lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, physical (dis)ability and legal status (Watson and Scraton, 2013; Thangaraj et al., 2018; Caudwell and McGee, 2018; Ratna and Samie, 2018; Kuppan, 2018; Mansfield et al., 2018).

At the same time, while highlighting omissions and complicating debates regarding leisure and forced migration, this collection aims to offer critical questions, analyses and discussions that can enrich wider debates of forced migration across academic disciplines. In fact, while leisure scholarship has been so far tied to narrow analytical lenses and questions when addressing the topic, wider debates in refugee/forced migration studies have rarely paid attention to leisure as a meaningful entry point to address the everyday lives, practices and negotiations of people seeking asylum.⁸

As recent perspectives have identified, the relevance of these analytical viewpoints is underlined by the tendency of the media, the public and some academic analysis to address refugees’ lives through the binaries of victimhood or extra-ordinary achievements, speechlessness or political participation (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). We contend that a critical focus on leisure domains can contribute to existing analyses that have articulated the violence of migration management processes and the ambivalences of hospitality with the complex everyday experiences of lives lived in asylum regimes (Darling, 2011, 2014; Mountz, 2011; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Mayblin, 2020; De Martini Ugolotti, 2020b).

Responding to and expanding these debates, this collection highlights how a critical engagement with leisure domains, mediums and contexts can represent a way of bridging academic research and the lived experiences of forced migration in ways that can be attentive and bring to the fore the nuances, complexities, harms and negotiations characterising the lives of people seeking asylum. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, paying attention to leisure domains can contribute to defy boundaries and rigid categorisations, refuse the narrative enclosures that flatten people seeking asylum into essentialising binaries, and explore contexts of forced migration beyond “the discursive channels through which abjection works” (Darling, 2014, p. 496).

Themes of the book

Three inter-related themes underpin this collection: spaces and temporalities; displaced bodies and intersecting inequalities; voices, praxis and (self)representation. These themes reflect a commitment to engage with perspectives and experiences that unsettle and oppose dehumanising or infantilising binaries, and instead aim to articulate the reach of asylum regimes with the complexities of refugees’ everyday lives and leisure practices.

The first theme, spaces and temporalities, underlines the relevance of domains that have been, so far, neglected in existing scholarship on leisure and (forced) migration, as well as in recent, state-of-the-art reviews on the topic (Stodolska, 2018; Spaaij et al., 2019). Recognising the relevance of this theme not only expands important debate of the spatial politics of leisure, but provides meaningful entry points to explore the “everyday geographies of asylum” (Darling, 2011, p. 408). This focus enables the potential to illuminate the gendered and racialised power relations shaping refugees’ “ordinary” spatial practices and contexts, and how these can be reproduced and negotiated through apparently mundane leisure domains.

Furthermore, as the production of (leisure) space is intertwined with the rhythms of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1991), a focus on the spatial politics of leisure can represent a meaningful way to examine forced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Leisure and forced migration: Lives lived in asylum systems
• PART I: Spaces and temporalities
• PART II: Displaced bodies and intersecting inequalities
• PART III: Voices, praxis, and (self)representation
• Index