Publish with The FRINGE Series

Proposals are to be sent via email to commissioning editors  Alena Ledeneva  and Dr Peter Zusi. We welcome all proposal, particularly edited volumes that: 

1. Suggest innovative take on area studies;
2. Resolve tensions between contextualisation and comparison;
3. Host research that is trans-regional and cross-disciplinary;
4. Build a research agenda by focusing on subjects deemed ‘fringe’ yet essential for understanding the workings of the centre.

All manuscripts in this series are published by UCL Press. Each of the manuscripts selected for publication will embody the FRINGE ethos by passing at least one of six FRINGE tests

FRINGE Test: 6-point criteria

Area test: making connections with other areas, crosschecking relevance, bridging disconnected discussions (for example, unification of Germany with unification of Korea; searching for economies of favours and compare their workings in post-communist contexts with those in other places)

Multi-discipline test: identifying possible links and finding additional angles and discourses that could make research relevant for other disciplines (for example, research on informality can be relevant for different disciplines, but it is essential to attract disciplinary scholars to see how).

Complexity test: articulating matters that are elusive (runaway scheming), substantively ambivalent (neither nor, or both), hidden (workings behind the facades of formal institutions), non-measurable, constitute paradoxes (legal corruption or legitimate crime, Sorites paradoxes), grey areas (neither legal, nor illegal) or blurred borderlines (both subversive and supportive, being both a problem and a solution, vague and necessarily unknowable).

Bottom-up test: focusing on ‘what works’, rather than what should work (increasingly, the funding bodies are interested in policy oriented and problem-solving approaches that require integrating top-down policies with bottom-up analysis of their effectiveness)
Networking test: reaching out for expertise that we do not have at the UCL in-house through social media and initiating fringy research networks.

Generalisation test:  avoiding generalisations where possible by being specific.

Published books (2017/2018)

Link	Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia by Francisco Martínez Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia. By exploring these places of cultural and historical significance, which all contribute to our understanding of how the new generation in Estonia is not following the expectations and values of its predecessor, the book also demonstrates how we can understand generational change in a material sense. Free download of the book
Link	The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality Vol. 1  Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse.  Free download of the book Learn more about UCL Press
Link	The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality Vol. 2 Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies. Free download of the book Learn more about UCL press

UCL Press 

FRINGE is published by UCL Press. UCL Press is the first fully Open Access University Press in the UK. It seeks to use modern technologies and 21st-century means of publishing/dissemination radically to change the prevailing models for the publication of research outputs. Grounded in the Open Science/Open Scholarship agenda, UCL Press will seek to make its published outputs available to a global audience, irrespective of their ability to pay, because UCL believes that this is the best way to tackle global Grand Challenges such as poverty, disease, hunger.