Feeling awkward? How do you perceive it when it happens or see it on TV?

The first study, conducted by Iván and Pauwke focuses on the ways in which students navigate awkward TV comedy series. Drawing on in-depth interviews, their study provides context on students’ engagement with awkwardness, specifically in comedy TV shows. Participants tend to feel more related to a character once this character experiences awkwardness: it makes it more real for the students. During awkward scenes, participants constantly shifted between the perspective of the character and their own perspective. Either by imagining themselves in that situation and how they would feel or by complementing the characters’ feelings and perspectives with their own. In an age of cultural awkwardness, general malaise of social norms that guides our behaviour in work, family, or social life, this study contributes to studies of awkwardness, its configuration in popular culture and audiences’ response to awkward-comic texts.

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen new awkward situations emerge, such as coughing in an elevator, or the nightmare of leaving your microphone on by accident in a Zoom meeting. This new shift in awkwardness was studied by Guilherme, Alina, Pauwke and Yosha, with a specific focus on the shift in social practices such as shaking hands to new interaction rituals. Based on their personal observations, this shift often resulted in awkwardness: “will we do an elbow pump/fist bump/wave?” - or were you often left hanging? Therefore, Guilherme, Alina, Pauwke and Yosha aimed to get a better understanding of what people perceived as failed interactions during the pandemic or how they perceived these awkward moments. They did so by looking at how awkwardness is discussed in social and news media during the first wave of the pandemic. With their study, they demonstrated that experiences of awkwardness often relate to the necessity of bodily and situational co-presence, creating a stronger sense of intimacy, synchronicity and sequency.

Pauwke and Yosha are currently working on their book A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Gone Wrong. Which is scheduled to be published next year. The studies with former Research Master students Guilherme, Alina and Iván are partly based on this project.