An assessment of the importance of dirt-related concepts to postcolonial understandings of urban identities, particularly in relation to ethnicity and race.

This strand examines the ways in which local accounts of physical or moral dirt engage with political and economic processes in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and the ways in which indigenous representations of ethnic dirt and cultural otherness resist or contest Western stereotypes. This strand asks: in urban popular discourses, what connections are drawn between dirt and cultural otherness, dirt and violence, dirt and migration, dirt and transgression, dirt and political processes? What are the implications of our findings for the implementation of antiracism policies in Africa and in Europe?