The University of Lagos will benefit from the European Union (EU) five-year funded research grant to the tune of 2.2 million euro.
According to a statement signed by the Deputy Registrar Information, University of Lagos, Toyin Adebule, the grant, which is for a tripartite joint research project between the Universities of Lagos, Sussex in the UK and the Kenyatta University in Nairobi, is being funded by the European Research Council of the EU.
The project known as “The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa, 1880 -Present’’, will span five years. It has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), an arm of the EU. Kenya has recently been awarded by the European Research Council of the European Union for a new international cultural studies project,” it said.
It said that the five-year tripartite research project among the institutions would survey African urban life and generate data based on attitudes to and perceptions of ‘dirt’ in the cities of Lagos and Nairobi.
It said that the international multicultural research project was seeking to understand and document how multiple and conflicting definitions of ‘dirt’ activate attitudes.
The statement also added that it was also seeking to get perceptions of dirt among people of similar or different backgrounds.
It said that the University of Lagos, recently signed the consortium agreement tagged (DIRTPOL), with the University of Sussex in the UK and Kenyatta University in Kenya.
According to the statement, DIRTPOL is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary attitudes to dirt which is expected to among other things, inform public health policy and practice in Africa.
It said that it would also to support NGOs with data to drive their field activities and significantly interface the humanities with the social and physical sciences.
The statement said that this was made possible by generating data that would be useful across disciplines to various scholars interested in cultural and environmental issues.
The statement said that the University of Lagos team is headed by a Regional Coordinator (RC), Dr Patrick Oloko, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English.
