Capoeira and parkour are two different body practices which have gained worldwide attention in urban settings in the last few decades. The following paper will explore how capoeira and parkour relate to the construction of identity paths amongst children of immigrants between 12 and 20 in Turin, Italy. It will do so by looking at how such practices are used by young men of migrant origin to negotiate and perform narratives of self-worth, belonging and recognition within marginalising and excluding urban environments. This study acknowledges that social identifications are created, negotiated and (re)produced through bodily and spatial means and within networks of power relations. Following this premise, the insights proposed in this paper suggest that the ambivalent and fluid use of bodies and spaces implied by capoeira and parkour can represent a meaningful lens to understand the embodied and spatial identity negotiations enacted by participants in their daily lives. This theoretical perspective will illuminate the place that active bodies, spaces and leisure practices take in the negotiation of social identities, and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, enacted by youth of migrant origin within early 21st century Turin cityscape.

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Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian bodily discipline that has now become a global phenomenon. In 2014 the cultural signifcance of capoeira was recognized on the world stage when it was awarded the special protected status of an 'Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity' by the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organisation. In the application to this organisation, and in wider advertising material and practitioner literature, capoeira is celebrated as a practice that promotes social cohesion, inclusivity, integration, racial equality and resistance to all forms of oppression. This paper seeks to problematize this inclusive discourse, exploring the extent to which it is both supported and contradicted in the gendered discourses and practices of specifc capoeira groups in Europe. Drawing upon ethnographic data, produced through two sets of ethnographic research and the researchers' 24 years of combined experience as capoeira players, this paper documents the complex and contradictory contexts in which discourses and practices of gender inclusivity are at once promoted and undermined.

Amid the normalisation of xenophobic narratives surrounding migration, and an overarching 'hostile environment' regulating asylum in Britain, this paper explores music-making as a unique lens to highlight the negotiation of belonging, uncertainty and marginality amongst a group of fifty forced migrants in Bristol. Through a focus addressing the nexus between power, affect and the everyday, this paper discusses how the dehumanising processes that characterise the British asylum regime operate in and through the spaces, bodies and objects constituting its 'ordinary' materiality. Concurrently, this paper addresses how the entanglement of bodies, 'things' and sounds emerging from the co-creation of weekly music groups enabled the group participants to negotiate pleasure, expression and sociality in a context of enforced marginality and uncertainty. Consequently, this paper discusses the music-making sessions as affective practices of diasporic belonging: relationalities arising from multiple forms of displacement that enabled momentary, but productive domains of sociability, co-presence and solidarity beyond ethnic, national, gendered and religious lines. The conclusions consider the contributions of theoretical approaches enabling researchers (and potentially advocates and community organisers) to recognise the stakes and significance of forced migrants' (in)visible forms of sociality that take place beside the discursive and institutional frames of State and humanitarian interventions.