Upcoming events
What Shall We Do With These Buildings? – Preview Screening & Fundraising Event in Support of Ukraine
When: 04 May 2022, 6.30-8.00pm

The film 'What Shall We Do With These Buildings?' is set in the city of Kharkiv, situated 30km from the Russian border. The city is the former capital of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet architecture is everywhere; the city's built environment is composed of the patrimony of this defunct regime. What should be done with these buildings? Should they be preserved, destroyed, repurposed? What power do they hold over the way people think and interact with their environment?
White Flowers, Red Hearts: Belarusian Protest Poetry in Solidarity with Ukraine
When: 28 April 2022, 5pm-7pm

PPV #28: Decolonising Russia's War on Ukraine
When: 26 March 2022, 3-7.30pm

This symposium is devoted to dissecting Russia's current war against Ukraine as a colonial enterprise; and to promoting understanding of Russian colonial violence as an essential part of planetary post-colonial and decolonial theory and practice.
PPV #27: Book Launch: Ewa Majewska’s Feminist Antifascism
Speakers: Ewa Majewska, Tariq Ali, Marsha Bradfield, Tim Waterman and Diane Bauer
When: 18 March 2022 at 6pm GMT. This will be an in-person event.

PPV #26: Babyn Yar: Architecture, Memory and Politics in Ukraine
Speakers: Anna Kamyshan
When: 17 March 2022 at 6pm GMT. This will be an in-person event.

PPV #25: Cosmic Commonism, Cosmic Communism, Cosmic Colonialism?
Speakers: Madina Tlostanova & Ewa Majewska
When: 20 January 2022 at 6.30pm GMT. This will be an online event.

Speakers: Dr Margarita Kuleva in conversation with Olesandr Dmitrenko (Pohititel Aromatov)
When: 16 December at 5pm GMT. This will be a hybrid event.

Online tabloid politics: predicting votes and values with celebrity and scandal
Speaker: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, Assistant Professor at Kozminski University and Visiting Fellow at LSE Department of Media and Communications
When: 10 December at 5pm GMT. This event will be held in the Masaryk room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 16 Taviton Street

When: 23 November at 5pm GMT. This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled.

PPV #22: The Aesthetics of Revolution: Broadcasts from Accra
When: 28 October 2021. This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled.

PPV #21: Commoning the Post-Socialist Ruins
When: 26 October 2021. This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled.

With the collapse of the communist regime what remained from the communist past – monuments, factories, unfinished housing buildings, memorials – were abandoned and decayed, as resembling an era that was left once and for all in the past. Here, abandonment is not something momentary that occurred in a specific temporal framework, but rather, an ongoing process, a modern ruin always in the making. While official sites of collective memory are articulated around pre-defined rhetorics, abandoned sites can become an active mode for negotiating the very process of decline and for understanding the transformation of public spaces in the post-socialist reality.
Book launch: Yuri Avvakumov's Paper Architecture
When: 12 October 2021. This event will take place online via Zoom.

- Past Events 2018-2021
FRINGE is currently compiling a full catalogue of events from 2015 until 2021. Please check back soon for updates. FRINGE is currently compiling a full catalogue of events from 2015 until 2021. Please check back soon for updates.
Term 1
- Protest and Performativity (in callaboration with UCL European Institute)
- Book Launch 1: Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (by Francisco Martinez)
Term 2
- On Neutrality (2019 Annual International Conference)
- Book Launch 2: The (City) Centre Cannot Hold? (Ed. Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski)
A Portal Not Only to Hell, But Also to Paradise: Park Zaryadye, The Sacred Centre of 21st Century Moscow
Where: Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow
When: 25 July-12 August 2018Zaryadye Park is a multi-billion rouble Kremlin-abutting prestige project, designed by the architects of Manhattan’s High Line on the ruins of the gargantuan Brezhnev-era Hotel Rossiya. It was opened with great fanfare by Vladimir Putin in September 2017. “A Portal…" is a research-based exhibition, comprised of 15 contemporary Russian artists’ reflections, interrogations and provocations on the theme of Zaryadye Park, and its relationship to the aesthetic, political and economic new order of late-Putinist Moscow.The exhibition emerges from “Zaryadyology", a collaborative research project, carried out by anthropologist of architecture Michal Murawski together with students and staff at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism in Moscow. The artists selected to take part in the project have chosen the focus and titles of their works themselves, but they were asked to respond to the work-in-progress results of the Zaryadyological research process.
Programme booklet- Past Events 2015-2018
FRINGE Annual International Workshop: Redefining Russian Diaspora (1918-2018): National Tradition and Transnational Contexts
Where: UCL SSEES and UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
When: 30-31 May 2018In contemporary discourse inside and outside Russia, ‘Russianness’ has become a rhetorical and conceptual point of contention. Starting with the premise that there is no single ‘fundamental’ Russian cultural formation—all relationships are historically produced and need to be made—we propose to examine the strategies of discursive constructions of Russianness and the Russian identity as enacted through cultural production in the geographically, chronologically and culturally distinct locations (across Russia and diaspora). The workshop convener is Dr Maria Rubins.
Programme
Book Launch: The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, volume 1 and 2
Where: UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
When: 22 March 2018Join the FRINGE Centre for this launch, which marks the first publication in the FRINGE Series. Prof Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society's open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. 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. Read and download both volumes here.
Shame on You: Theorising shame, pride and community in contemporary culture
Where: Banqueting Hall, Chelsea College of Arts, SW1P 4JU
When: 9 February 2018With shame still being used as a means of excluding groups on the basis of sexual identities, this event will explore the experiences of those that are marginalized and the ways in which excluded groups are using shame as a way of carving out new positive identities. With a focus of issues of gender, class, and pan-sexuality.
Crossing the Great Divide? Reassessing East-West Relations During the Cold War and After
Where: UCL SSEES and UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
When: 25 January 2018Evolving and multivalent, Russia’s relationship to the West is not a simple one to uncover, let alone to evaluate. This panel discussion, with authors Dr Egle Rindzeviciute and Prof Irina Busygina, will shed new light on East-West relations by analysing sources of contemporary tension and evaluating little known areas of cooperation during the Cold War.
Revolutionary Dostoevsky: Rethinking Radicalism
Where: UCL SSEES and UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
When: 20-21 October 2017FRINGEr Dr Sarah Young brings together experts from literary studies, philosophy, theology and political science, to reassess the author’s status as ‘prophet’ of the revolution and explore new understandings of the notion of ‘the radical’ in all senses in his writing. This event is sponsored by The FRINGE Centre.
Launch of Global Atlas of Social and Cultural Complexity
Where: UCL Institute of Advanced Studies
When: 17 March 2016The Global Atlas of Social and Cultural Complexity is the first multimedia online resource focused on under-researched practices across which are often seen as non-transparent or hidden to an outsider. The launch will provide a taster of informality, with short introductions that illuminate informal and invisible practices from across the globe.
FRINGE Launch
Where: UCL Institute of Advanced Studies
When: 3 December 2015