Fringe Lab
Fringe Lab is an interdisciplinary space devoted to teasing out the contours of fringes, edges, borders, and margins—centering people, phenomena, and knowledges that have been dismissed, ridiculed, and pathologized. These range from conspiracy theories to border technologies, from occult thought to online fandoms, from manuscript marginalia to “liminal” spaces, from ephemeral media to pop culture discourses. Fringe Lab provides a space for studying that which resists and confronts the academe itself. Our aim is neither to vindicate nor to expose the fringe, but to ask why particular claims, practices, and communities spring up in specific times and places, and to question the position of academic institutions and authorized knowledge in relation to those fringes. Rather than debunking or validating, our interest is in the messy internal logics of fringe thinking and production: its various affects, (dis)orientations, practices, productions, rhetorics, epistemologies, and cultural norms.
The tensions embedded within this project – institutional location and institutional critique, analytical distance and ethical proximity, symmetry of method and asymmetry of consequence – are not problems to resolve, but the very conditions under which serious work on the fringe becomes possible.
If you would like to join us on the fringe, please get in touch.