FRINGE News

The FRINGE Centre explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, FRINGE examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, and clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Our interest lies in the hidden complexity of all embedded practices, taken-for-granted and otherwise invisible subjects. Illuminating the ‘fringe’ thus puts the ‘centre’ in a new light. The FRINGE Centre is an initiative founded by UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), which works within the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) framework to pursue Critical Area Studies. Learn more about FRINGE

Critical Area Studies

Area Studies has often been understood not simply in contrast but indeed in subordination to the traditional academic disciplines: as mere application to a particular region of the general principles formulated within university disciplines. Critical Area Studies, by contrast, centres on the conviction that knowledge generated from the ‘bottom up’—that is, from particular contexts and with specialist understanding of local complexities—does not simply apply but in fact alters and even produces general principles. Further, Critical Area Studies is committed to the idea that interdisciplinary inquiry brings innovative perspectives that the traditional disciplines, or even multi-disciplinary combinations thereof, often overlook.