Sounding Displacement and Emplacement: Interrogating Cultural Literacy through Epistemic Justice

Through engagement with music (king) at the intersection of leisure, migration and cultural geographies, this keynote puts cultural literacy and epistemic justice into constructive dialogue. This dialogue acquires particular urgency amid intensifying practices of bordering, rising nativism and differential precarity, which shape the lived experiences of displacement and emplacement and the unequal conditions under which knowledge about migration and "difference" is produced, recognised and circulated. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with refugee- and ally-led musicking groups in two contrasting British contexts—the city of Bristol and the Isle of Portland, where the Bibby Stockholm asylum accommodation barge was docked between 2023 and 2025—the keynote explores how musicking can operate as a practice of epistemic justice. It considers how musicking can create conditions through which marginalised forms of knowing, expression and creativity may contribute to collective processes of knowledge production and world-making.