This article explores the impact of human migration on the formation, negotiation, and contestation of community and music. In particular, it examines migration patterns in the Republic of Ireland. The first section provides a context for contemporary migration by surveying migration patterns over the last thirty years. The second section explores the impact of migration on community and introduces the concept of sonic hospitality. The final section examines the links between migration and knowledge transfer, with particular reference to tacit, embodied knowledge and its implications for teaching and learning in a multicultural context.

As a specialist in ritual theory and performance, with some professional experience of communtiy music, I have always been struck by the robust resistance to clear-cut definitions or identities, by both ritual and community music. This article takes as its point of departure the proposal of ritual scholar Catherine Bell, that we abandon the quest for conceptual identity and more fruitfully turn our attention to the potential of practice to generate its own identity. Drawing on a post-modern interpretation of practice theory, she explores four ways in which practices generate meaning: through strategic behaviour, situationality, the necessary misrecognition of its own enterprise, and its potential for redemptive hegemony in its discourse with power. The paper concludes with an example from my own work with the refugee and asylum seeking community in Limerick, and an interrogation of Bell's proposal, with reference to this experience of music-making.

There is increasing recognition that people’s lived experience needs to be incorporated into health decision-making. This has led to rising imperatives for involving the public in health processes, including research. While there have been significant advances in the field, patterns of exclusion still exist in some areas, including migrant participation in health research. Migration and mobility create challenges around social inclusion and this extends to social and cultural practices used in research. There is an emerging body of literature about improving meaningful, participatory spaces for migrants’ involvement in health research using creative tools and techniques that are attuned to cultural diversity. These include the use of arts-based research methods. There is strong evidence for the use of music, particularly singing, as an effective arts-based participatory tool. The goal of this scoping review is to investigate the evidence for the use of music as an arts-based method in migrant health research. Developed by an interdisciplinary team specialising in public and patient involvement; nursing and midwifery; primary health care; and the performing arts, it aims to analyse existing evidence across disciplines that are not usually studied together, identify gaps in current knowledge and use these as a foundation to build effective strategies towards increasing access to and knowledge of participatory, arts-based methods using music in migrant health research. Methods: The protocol for this scoping review follows the guidelines and stages set out in the JBI Reviewer’s Manual (Peters et al., 2017), and by Levac et al, (2010), which build on the methodological framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005). This incorporates six stages: 1) Identifying the research question; 2) Identifying relevant studies; 3) Study selection; 4) Charting the data; 5) Collating, summarising, and reporting results; and 6) Consultation.

Why do so many people feel part of something bigger than themselves when they sing with others? How does listening to people sing, especially in certain ritual contexts, give us this same feeling? With this book, singer and scholar Helen Phelan draws on over two decades of musical and educational research to explore the agency of singing in fostering experiences of belonging through ritual performance. Set against the backdrop of “the new Ireland” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it charts Ireland’s growing multiculturalism, changing patterns of migration, the diminishing influence of Catholicism, and synergies between local and global forms of cultural expression in its investigation of rights and rites of belonging. Richly autobiographical and autoethnographic, it examines a range of religious, educational, civic, and community-based rituals, including religious rituals of new migrant communities in “borrowed” rituals spaces; baptismal rituals in the context of the Irish citizenship referendum; rituals that mythologize the core values of an educational institution; a ritual laboratory for students of singing; and community-based festivals and performances. These close to the ground narratives peel back the physiological, emotional, and cultural layers of singing to investigate how it functions as a potential agent of belonging. Each chapter engages theoretically with one of five core characteristic of singing (resonance, somatics, performance, temporality, and tacitness) anchored in ethnographic descriptions of performed rituals. In doing so, it builds a persuasive theory of ritually framed singing as a potent tool in the creation of inclusive communities of belonging.

The Irish World Music Café was created in 2015 in Limerick, Ireland, in the context of the Irish Refugee Protection Programme. The Café is grounded in the four ‘PERC’ principles of participatory, ethical, reflexive and creative engagement. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Café moved online on World Refugee Day 2020 with two additional online Cafés thereafter. In January 2021, a review of participation in the Café commenced to guide the decision-making processes regarding content, format and mode of engagement for the immediate and long-term future. The review was qualitative, comprising ten ethnographic interviews and author fieldnotes. Data generated were interpreted using thematic analysis. Three themes were identified through this process: enablers, activities and experiences. It concludes with the proposal that the expanded temporal, spatial and relational opportunities created through the online environment correlate with reduced opportunities for kinaesthetic-tactile embodied experiences. Understanding the dynamic relationship between planes of lived experience is important in the future development of the Café.