Research explores how unequal mobilities impact musical life between Tunisia and Europe

The Open University (OU) has been awarded £130,000 from The Leverhulme Trust to support a major new research project, entitled: ‘Musically Stuck: immobile musicians and mobile music between Tunisia and Europe’.

Led by Dr Susannah Knights and supported by Professor Byron Dueck in the OU’s Music Department, the project will offer the first in depth study into the effects of immobility on musical creativity, aspiration, and political space between North Africa and Europe.

Dr Knights explains the motivation behind the project:

“I’ll be using this grant to look deeply into the relationship between music and immobility, focusing on the people and sounds whose circulations – and curtailed movements – shape postcolonial space between Tunisia and Europe. Amid the scholarly and journalistic focus on migration and on those who move, I think it is crucial to pay attention to the realities of immobility that underpin many people’s daily lives, particularly in the global south. Immobility is a central problem for people in Tunisia, including musicians, who are routinely excluded from spaces of performance by European border policies.”

A new lens on music, migration, and inequality

The project challenges dominant narratives in music and migration studies, which have tended to focus on artists who travel rather than those who are prevented from doing so. It will develop a new theoretical framework for understanding how immobility informs musical practice, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Tunis and Europe, digital mapping of musical and migratory trajectories, and close collaboration with Tunisian musicians working across genres from rap and pop to ma’louf (a type of Andalusi art music) and electronic music.

Dr Knights added:

“This fellowship gives me the time and resources to study these issues ethnographically: to learn how music making and musical listening enter into the senses and lived realities of immobility for Tunisia based musicians. Through fieldwork across multiple sites in Tunisia and Europe, I will explore how musicians navigate the disjuncture between the mobility of musical media and their own feelings of ‘stuckness’, and how they use music to negotiate or relieve that condition. I will also investigate how European and Tunisian institutional mechanisms seek to control and shape the trajectories of people and sounds.

“Ultimately, this grant enables me to address the often-hidden struggle for mobility itself – and to understand how the realms of arts and aesthetics become sites for that struggle.”

Fieldwork across Tunis and Europe

Dr Knights will spend the first half of the fellowship conducting fieldwork in Tunis – the heart of Tunisia’s contemporary music scenes – and in key European cities. She will build a detailed database tracking the trajectories of musicians, songs, cultural initiatives, media platforms, and immigration policies, enabling a multi layered analysis of how mobility and immobility shape musical life.

The second half of the fellowship will focus on producing major research outputs, including a monograph, Musically Stuck, journal articles, an OU conference on aesthetics and immobility across the Mediterranean and a set of ArcGIS Story Maps for public engagement at a leading UK music festival.

Support from the OU Music Department

Professor Byron Dueck, who will act as mentor on the fellowship, emphasised the importance of the work:

“We’re delighted to have Dr Susannah Knights joining the Music Department on a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Susannah’s research will shine light on the sharp contrast between the free circulation of music and the restricted circulation of the people who make it, a contrast that has consequences not only for the livelihoods of musicians but also for the forms of musical sociability that can flourish in the countries denying those musicians entry. We’re very much looking forward to engaging with the project, providing feedback on ideas and publications as they develop, and supporting a conference on the project themes.”

Dr Knights’s project will complement current departmental research on music, migration and mediation, as well as a longstanding focus at The Open University on the practices and experiences of working musicians.

Building a new research network

The fellowship will establish an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on immobility, music, and Mediterranean studies. It will also explore ways to foster collaboration between music researchers and practitioners, and to present research in a range of academic and non-academic spaces.