Music Refuge
Book • 2025
Ailbhe Kenny's 'Music Refuge: Living Asylum Through Music' examines music-making and listening within asylum-seeking accommodation in Ireland and Germany, using participatory projects and case studies to reveal music's role in recognition, community-building, and resilience.
The book combines close ethnographic work, analysis of music programmes, and first-person interludes that foreground refugees' musical stories.
Kenny highlights how music creates possibility spaces, supports intergenerational learning, and can act as a form of radical belonging within liminal, often oppressive, asylum contexts.
She offers practical recommendations for designing inclusive musical spaces across schools, cultural organisations, and community programmes.
The work argues for recognising displaced people as active cultural agents and for planning arts engagement as part of meaningful integration policy.
The book combines close ethnographic work, analysis of music programmes, and first-person interludes that foreground refugees' musical stories.
Kenny highlights how music creates possibility spaces, supports intergenerational learning, and can act as a form of radical belonging within liminal, often oppressive, asylum contexts.
She offers practical recommendations for designing inclusive musical spaces across schools, cultural organisations, and community programmes.
The work argues for recognising displaced people as active cultural agents and for planning arts engagement as part of meaningful integration policy.
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Ailbhe Kenny
Ailbhe Kenny, "Music Refuge: Living Asylum through Music" (Oxford UP, Press 2025)
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Dave O'Brien
Ailbhe Kenny
Ailbhe Kenny, "Music Refuge: Living Asylum through Music" (Oxford UP, Press 2025)
