Research and creative work: TIDE: travel, transculturality and identity in England

Professor Nandini Das and Preti Taneja introduce us to the TIDE project, which asks how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human identity based on cultural identification and difference. We hear in particular about the project’s creative work, which culminated in an online Salon responding to and transforming the research.

We discuss the boundaries and boundary-crossing of the project and the histories it studies, the cultural silencing and ‘invisible debate’ of the history of Empire in modern Britain, and the ways in which race and racism are used to internalise concepts of who does and doesn’t matter. The TIDE project is doing fantastic work to transform the teaching of the history of migration in schools, producing learning packs and other resources, as well as open-access research tools such as a series of Keywords which show the different stories a word can be used to tell. Preti and Nandini show us that it is possible to ‘worry against the root’s of a word’s historical meaning in order to ‘make another language’.

This film includes footage of the Salon, created by Preti Taneja, Ben Crowe, Sweety Kapoor, Steve Chandra Savale, Sarathy Korwar, Shama Rahman, Ms. Mohammed, Sanah Ahsan and Zia Ahmed.