A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Informal Problem-solving Around the World

Webinar: time tbc [link to be confirmed]
Book launch: 6:00pm-8:00pm

The FRINGE series is a platform for cross-disciplinary analysis and the development of ‘area studies without borders.’ FRINGE is an acronym standing for Fluidity, Resistance, Invisibility, Neutrality, Grey zones, and Elusiveness – categories fundamental to the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (Feb 2024, UCL press).

Its third volume, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Informal Problem-solving Around the World, continues to advance the central themes of the series – informality, human cooperation, local knowledge and global conjunctions, context-bound specifics and context-free universal patterns. This time, the journey into societies’ open secrets, unwritten rules and hidden practices is, quite literally, life-long: it starts with an ‘anchor baby’ strategically born in a certain jurisdiction and ends with the practices of digitalising death rituals in China. If a planetary hitchhiker visited Earth, this volume would be a perfect guide to informal problem-solving, or know-how, which networks’ insiders tend to use without sharing it with outsiders.

For this event, the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Alena Ledeneva will be in conversation with authors and critics of the volume in a truly global webinar (the list of speakers/time zones tbc), open to the public.