Czuć się nieswojo. O kategorii „awkward” w badaniach kultury
Feeling awkward: Awkwardness as a concept in cultural studies

Summary/Abstract: The text reconstructs the emergence of the awkwardness as a category in cultural studies and anthropology as a productive term initiating socially oriented studies of objects and archives. Awkward objects, or “difficult”, “controversial”, “embarrassing” objects allow to reveal contentious issues. They thus act as a prism that splits seemingly unified discourses (Jonas Tinius). At the same time awkward objects force the user to focus on themselves, provocatively revealing their communicative incoherence, ambiguity, multiplicity (Erica Lehrer, Roma Sendyka, Wojciech Wilczyk, Magdalena Zych). The cognitive dissonance they trigger reveals internalized cognitive assumptions that are put to a test. It points toward unresolved issues, especially those related to the past (Sharon Macdonald, Erica Lehrer), and reveals the entanglement of communities in dramatic and unaccounted events. Research procedures, built around the category of awkwardness thus lead to a critical renewal — as theorists (Adam Kotsko, Mary Cappello) predicted — of individual as well as communal approaches to the past.

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