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.