A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Informal Problem-solving Around the World
28 May 2024, 4:00 pm–8:00 pm
IAS / ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Press Fringe series Webinar and Book Launch
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº staff | ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
SSEES Masaryk Room4th floor¹û¶³Ó°Ôº, 16 Taviton Street, LondonWC1H 0BW
Webinar: time tbc [link to be confirmed]
Book launch: 6:00pm-8:00pm
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  (Feb 2024, ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº 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.
About the Speaker
Alena Ledeneva
Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº and a founder of the Global Informality Project (in-formality.com) and The Global Encyclopedia of Informality (2018). She graduated from Cambridge University (Newnham) and authored Russia's Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), Can Russia Modernize? (2013)