Dirt

Dirt is evoked to signify many important facets of mountain bike culture including its emergence, history and everyday forms of practice and affect. These significations are also drawn upon to frame the sport's (sub)cultural and counter-ideological affiliations. In this article we examine how both the practice of mountain biking and, specifically, mountain bike trail building, raises questions over the object and latent function of dirt, hinting at the way that abjection can, under certain circumstances, be a source of intrigue and pleasure. In doing so, we suggest a re-symbolization of our relationship with dirt via a consideration of the terrestrial.

In India, recent year construction and demolished concrete waste handling and management is the challenging problem faced by several area of the country. It is very challenging and hectic problem that has to be tackled in an indigenous manner, Due to strict environmental laws and lack of dumping sites in urban areas, construction & demolished waste disposal is a great problem. It is desirable to completely recycle construction & demolished concrete waste in order to protect natural resources, environment and reduce environmental pollution. In this research paper a study is carried out to investigate the physical properties of construction &demolished waste material for concrete, for using as a coarse aggregate in new construction. The present investigation to be focused on recycling construction & demolished waste materials in order to reduce construction cost and resolving housing problems faced by the low income communities of the India in different part of the country. The crushed construction and demolished concrete wastes is segregated by sieving to obtain required sizes of aggregate, several tests were conducted to determine the aggregate properties before recycling it into new concrete.

Victorian literature not infrequently reveals the fragility of this coveted social order. For instance, in Braddon’s sensation novel, Aurora Floyd (1863), the ‘uncontaminated’ middle-class domestic haven is threatened by the very heroine, depicted as a mysterious femme fatale, and therefore the epitome of the ‘improper’ feminine. On the contrary, in Riddell’s City novel, The Race for Wealth (1866), the (il)legitimate capitalist activities of the male protagonist, Lawrence Barbour, are seemingly counterbalanced by Olivine Sondes, a paragon of  innocence and domestic virtue ; but no matter how hard she strives to protect from pollution “the very citadel of her purity”, she fails “ to shake the dust and dirt of London off”. Evidently, both Olivine and Aurora are meant to ‘cross the line’ at the root of the Victorian separation of ‘spheres’, calling into question the ‘naturalness’ of the domestic ideology, as well as the Victorian ideal of angelic femininity, and starting out a personal evolution in opposite directions. Given the above, in this paper I intend to outline the similarities, and the dissimilarities, of their roads to (im)pure womanhood.

Beginning with a discussion of the concept of dirt, including synthetic dirt, as contextualised by film critic Peter Brook, I raise pertinent ideas from the work of
Nicolas Bourriaud about contemporary visual art. I then move on to an analysis of the representation of literal and synthetic dirt within the science fiction film District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (2009). Using Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s work on the implications of the significance of the encounter with the alien as the ultimate contact zone between self and other, I concentrate on the physical, emotional and aesthetic effects achieved as the central protagonist of District 9 moves from a human to an alien embodiment. I chart the progress of the body-horror and ethical development entailed in this change of state, making reference to ideas first developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas. The viewer’s responses are shown to be complex and muddy, composed of warring impulses of revulsion and admiration. As the central character, Wikus, becomes an alien his body becomes a rich symbolic ground. His increasingly leaky, abject body reflects ideas which can be interpreted universally, but more specifically within the South African context reveal anxieties about the cohesion of a minority group. I conclude by analysing the end of the film, which is moving, future-directed and insistent on the significance of art in society.

In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness. Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning.

Dans le nord du Bihar, la boue assure la prospérité des fermiers, et signale également, sur plan matériel, le statut inférieur auquel les femmes de fermiers tentent d'échapper en élevant leurs familles, et ce au péril de leurs vies et de celles de leurs enfants. Cet article présente une analyse sémiotique de la boue, une matière ambiguë dans sa combinaison physique de la terre et de l'eau, une substance qui comporte des dimensions de classe et de genre spécifiques, et un marqueur symbolique dont la présence sur les corps indexe leur identité sociopolitique. Les relations sensuelles autour de la boue et les préjudices qu'elle indexe mettent en lumière les significations de la saleté au sein des connaissances sur l'environnemental et le risque. En observant le processus sémiotique par lequel la nature est comprise, cet article suggère que la boue naturalise la discrimination à l'origine de la saleté. Les circonstances historiques et politiques, telle l'atténuation progressive des liens entre caste et occupation, montrent que la boue n'est pas saleté, mais devient sale lorsque d'autres types de saleté perdent leur signification.

En el norte de Bihar, el barro garantiza la prosperidad para los agricultores, pero también señala materialmente el estatus inferior desde donde sus esposas intentan criar a la familia, incluso a costa de arriesgar su propia vida y la de sus hijos. Este artículo presenta un análisis semiótico del barro/lodo, un material ambiguo en su combinación física de tierra y agua, una sustancia con dimensiones específicas de género y clase, y un marcador simbólico cuya presencia en los cuerpos humanos moldea la identidad sociopolítica de los mismos. Las relaciones sensoriales que giran en torno al lodo, así como los prejuicios que éste conlleva, iluminan los significados de lo sucio en los procesos de conocimiento y riesgo ambiental. Al prestar atención a los procesos semióticos a través de los cuales entendemos la naturaleza, este artículo sugiere que el lodo naturaliza la discriminación en el origen mismo de lo sucio y lo enlodado. Circunstancias históricas y políticas tales como el debilitamiento progresivo de los vínculos entre casta y ocupación muestran que el lodo no es sucio, sino que se convierte en sucio cuando otros tipos de suciedad pierden su significado.

Land managers are required to assess a range of environmental attributes prior to and after prescribed burning. Current environmental assessments vary depending on the organisation involved and the existing information about localised soil erosion. Auditing successful environmental assessments requires ongoing field monitoring to evaluate whether the magnitude and extent of predicted post-fire impacts are comparable. The impacts of post-fire erosion were assessed by the authors using the techniques of water ...

Following on from other media theorists, John Hartley suggested in 1983 that ‘if TV has a distinctive feature, it is that it is a “dirty” category’. In this conception, television's dirt, and the power it manifests, is purely metaphorical: an effect of its ‘scandalous’ aggravation of otherwise ‘clean’ binary formations. Decades later, television's dirtiness has taken on new, more literal forms, as prime-time reality programming embraces domestic dirt and disorder as its cause célèbre. These programmes, exemplified by the popular UK format How Clean is your House? (2003- ), give new relevance to Hartley's conception and invite a critical reappraisal of the formal relationships between dirt, television and power. More specifically, the particular association between reality television and material dirt is predicated upon a long history of cultural prejudice against both. Indeed, one broadsheet reviewer has proposed that reality programming about filthy houses offers ‘ev...