FRINGE: the latest addition to IAS

3rd December 2015
The latest addition to UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) is the FRINGE centre: the centre for the study of social & cultural complexity.

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, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Illuminating the 'fringe' thus puts the 'centre' in a new light. The FRINGE Centre is based at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and funded by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Their interest lies in the hidden complexity of all embedded practices, and more broadly in the intricacies that 'embeddedness' as such entails. This inspires their conviction that an innovative area studies-not just the accumulation of local knowledge, but rather an area studies without borders-must assume a critical position within current academic inquiry.