Synopsis
Dirt - and our rituals to eradicate it - is as much a part of our everyday lives as eating, breathing and sleeping. Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? Exploring a wide variety of settings - domestic, urban, suburban and rural - the contributors expose how our ideas about dirt are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. The result is a a rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.
About the Authors
Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in London, which in 2014 won the Urban Communication Foundation Jane Jacobs Award and was Commended in the Royal Institute for British Architects President's Awards for Research. Ben is Professor of Urbanism and Urban History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK, and Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory.
Rosie Cox is Professor of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. She has been researching au pairs and other forms of paid domestic labour in the UK for nearly 20 years. She is the author of The Servant Problem: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy (2006), coeditor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007), co-author of Reconnecting Consumers, Producers and Food: Exploring Alternatives (2008), Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (2011) and editor of Au Pairs' Lives in Global Context (2015).
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