Sites of intensity: leisure and emotions amid the necropolitics of asylum

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to highlight new insights on the social and political dimensions of emotions experienced within leisure through a specific focus on the everyday lives of people seeking asylum in the UK. In doing so, we draw on and expand inter-disciplinary perspectives that have underlined how the affective intensities and (in)capacities of bodies, and the conditions through which these emerge in everyday lives, are central in the workings of power. Leisure scholars have advanced important analyses on the politics of affects and emotions at the intersection of gendered, sexual and racialised axis of difference. Yet, the relevance of these perspectives has yet to be fully explored in articulating leisure, forced migration and the (necro)politics of asylum. Drawing on two ethnographic studies with people seeking asylum and their allies in Bristol and Leeds, UK, this paper contributes to address this gap by looking at two different leisure domains, music-making and football, as sites of intensity: not just discursive or symbolic, but lived, embodied and felt domains where the gradual wounding produced by the asylum regime is both made manifest and negotiated.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure
• music-making
• football
• emotions
• necropolitics
• refugees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, the terms ‘refugee’, ‘forced migrant’, ‘people seeking sanctuary/asylum’ will be used inclusively to refer to people at all stages of the asylum process, unless when relevant to draw attention to the differences produced by the maze of the asylum system (see Lewis, 2015).

2. This work does not focus predominantly on the embodied intensities and emotions directly connected to playing music and football, as these have been discussed more specifically in our previous work on the topic (De Martini Ugolotti, 2022; Webster, 2022).

3. Foucault's notion of biopolitics (2007 [1978]) addressed the emergence from the 19th century of a governmental reason whose focus is on sustaining, controlling and ordering the life and health of a population. Within this governmental reason, a differential exposure to risks to life and health among particular groups are considered acceptable to protect the biological life of the overall population and enhance its productive capacity. Agamben's notion of ”bare life” (1998) elaborated on this to underline how the production of a political order (e.g. the state) is based on the exclusion of some human beings. Those who are stripped of their legal status and rights become ”bare” and expendable lives in front of the sovereign and live in physical and legal ”states of exception”.

4. See Fanon (1967).

5. The Home Office dispersal programme accommodates people claiming asylum on a no-choice basis across cities and towns in Britain, for an exhaustive and critical overview of the programme see Hynes (2011).

6. Despite periods of interruption, the group continued to meet as this paper was being written.

7. The participants hugely appreciated and underlined the importance of the support provided by local charities. However, while being grateful for the often-fundamental help they received, the participants also explained how charity spaces were inextricably attached to physical and emotional intensities of shame at poverty and reliance on others, stress, anxiety, humiliation, fear, isolation and sheer hunger (see ”How will we survive?”, British Red Cross and Refugee Survival Trust, 2021; Mayblin, 2020).

8. As pointed out during the debates on the latest Nationality and Borders bill by Lord Kerr of Kinlochard in November 2021 ‘Facts do not support the case for cruelty’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicola De Martini Ugolotti

Nicola De Martini Ugolotti is Senior Lecturer in Sport and Physical Culture at Bournemouth University (United Kingdom) and a member of Associazione Frantz Fanon (Italy). Nicola's research is located at the intersection of leisure, sport, urban and migration studies. In 2022, Nicola has co-edited with Jayne Caudwell the book ”Leisure and Forced Migration: Lives Lived in Asylum Systems” (2022).

Chris Webster

Chris Webster completed his PhD at the School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University (United Kingdom) with a project on the (in)significance of grassroots football spaces in the lives of forced migrants in Leeds. Chris is the co-founder of the Football For All initiative through the Yorkshire St. Pauli Football Fan Club and is Drop-in and Volunteer coordinator at Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers (PAFRAS) in Leeds.