Project Information

This is the virtual arm of TRANSPORTATION TRANSFORMATION: Migration, Teleportation, and Railways,  a community engagement and performance research project made possible through funding from the AHRC Cultural Engagement Partnership Fellowship Scheme based at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.

This project that used physics, dance, theatre, visual arts, personal migration narratives and oral history to construct performances and facilitate public dialogue around the complexities of human migration and quantum teleportation.   The project is brought was the vision of artist and researcher Dr. Carol Marie Webster.  In 2013,  the project drew together seemingly disparate phenomena – historical moments in the construction and culture of Leeds, UK Central Railway Station, migration narratives from the African Caribbean community in Chapeltown, Leeds, UK and narratives from physicists researching quantum teleportation at the University of Oxford.  Through critical exchange around challenges of transportation and transformation, the project explored issues of identity, belonging, religion, and gender.

Bible of Testimonies. Created by set designer, Carol Sorhaindo

Since 2013, research in quantum experimentation has progressed such that quantum computing and applications of the principles  that guide quantum researchers are ever closer and influential in twenty-first century contemporary life.

David Hamilton, Dance Artist, Leeds, UK Photographer – Mojtaba Moharrer

At the launch of this project, in 2013-2014, migration was already a complex political and social issue, one that  took on a deeper role as a  symptom and a strategy for the creation of new populations of vulnerable peoples around the world.   In 2016 onward, migration is THE front line topic in national and international policy, identity, human rights, technology, and security discourses.  And now,  issues of migration is implicated in most every sector of life.  The team of Transportation Transformation: Migration, Teleportation, and Railways continues to engage in the varied discourses at the convergence of migration, technology, and transport.

The follow-up phase of this project is in progress; new resources, narratives, community engagements, and performances on the way.