16 July, 10.30–17.30

 

10.30: Opening remarks – Brian Dillon and Kate Forde

11.00: Smear campaigns – Steven Connor

11.45: Coffee break

12.10: Contamination, ritual impurity and social death: the body in ancient Hebrew texts – Maureen Bloom

12.55: Why is paid sex dirty? – Brooke Magnanti

13.40: Lunch

14.40: Democracy is a dirty word: the politics of health – Elizabeth Pisani

15.40: Coffee break

16.00: Lesser Humans: 260 million Dalits demand a life of dignity and equality – Meena Varma

16.45: Roundtable discussion

17.15: Closing remarks 

17.30: Drinks reception

 

More about the sessions

Smear campaigns

Just as animals use odours and excrement to demarcate their territories, so human animals use imaginary pollution to define different groups and keep them at a distance. We will consider some of the many forms of this dirt-mapping, whether disgust at the diets of other peoples, the theory of specialised national diseases (‘French pox’, ‘Asian flu’), the attribution of noxious sexual perversions to the adherents of different religions, or the disdain for the cacophony (literally ‘dirty talk’) of other languages. With Steven Connor.

Contamination, ritual impurity and social death: the body in ancient Hebrew texts

Notions of the ‘unclean’ are a feature of many of the world’s major religions. Ritual impurity, as described in Leviticus, encompasses curious ideas and methods of dealing with everyday existence, particularly regarding the body and what goes into it (e.g. food) and comes out of it (e.g. blood). The rules and rituals governing this impurity can seem impenetrable to outsiders, and this talk will lift the veil on these attempts to bring order to society and to control the unpredictability of the human condition. With Maureen Bloom.

Why is paid sex dirty?

The presentation explores the history of prostitution in the modern age, from the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 to the present day. While legal frameworks around selling sex often change, the view of a sex worker as ‘soiled’ or ‘ruined’ is a consistent theme in cultural commentary. From Victorian moral panics to “World Cup AIDS Time Bomb”, the focus will be on the gulf between perceptions of sex workers as unclean and realities revealed in new historic and epidemiological research. With Brooke Magnanti, aka ‘Belle du Jour’.

Democracy is a dirty word: the politics of health

Why do we spend more on some diseases than on others? It would be nice to believe that we dole out cash according to need. But, this speaker argues, that’s rarely the case. Having worked for over a decade on the defining epidemic of our age – HIV – she’s convinced that public morality stands in the way of sensible decisions. When ‘dirty’ behaviour is involved, democracy fails miserably to protect those most in need of help. With Elizabeth Pisani.

Lesser Humans: 260 million Dalits demand a life of dignity and equality

There are 260 million people worldwide who suffer from human rights abuses of the very worst kind. These abuses have continued over 3000 years – often unacknowledged and mostly unchallenged. This is caste discrimination suffered by Dalits ('outcastes', or 'untouchables') living in South Asia. The caste system is a strict hierarchical social system based on underlying notions of impurity and pollution. Dalits suffer discrimination influencing all spheres of life; in modern India they are treated as subhuman and systematically segregated and humiliated. Even in the UK, Dalits have little or no recourse to justice. The world needs to act now. With Meena Varma.