Awkwardness offers an overview of the psychology and philosophy of awkwardness, addressing questions like, Why do social interactions become awkward, and why does it matter? What can awkwardness teach us about the gaps in our understanding of the world and of each other? Drawing on the psychology of emotion and social norms, Alexandra Plakias posits a theory of awkwardness and explains how it differs from other self-conscious emotions like embarassment. Plakias explores the reasons why we find awkwardness so unpleasant, and shows how our desire to avoid it leads to negative moral and social consequences. Along the way, this book touches on topics like awkward pauses, cringe comedy, and the question of whether some people are more awkward than others.

Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” —MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems “A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” —SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.

Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy explores the new forms, voices and venues of stand-up comedy in different parts of the world and its potential role as a counterhegemonic tool for satire, commentary and expression of identity especially for the disempowered or marginalised. The title brings together essays and perspectives on stand-up and satire from different cultural and political contexts across the world which raise pertinent issues regarding its role in contemporary times, especially with the increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form. It examines the theoretical understanding of the different aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand-up comedy, as well as the exploration of race, gender, politics and conflicts, urban culture and LGBTQ+ identities in countries such as Indonesia, Finland, France, Iran, Italy, Morocco, India and the USA. It also asks the question whether, along with contesting and destabilising existing discursive frameworks and identities, a stand-up comic can open up a space for envisaging a new social, cultural and political order? This book will appeal to people interested in performance studies, media, popular culture, digital culture, sociology, digital sociology and anthropology, and English literature. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Helsinki.

Theory of Seven I am psychology, what it should be: simple, clear, without clever words.This is the doctrine of the seven inner self, from which the character of man is formed, 7 psychical types and 7 team roles are born.The theory of seven I is a powerful tool for knowledge the inner world: it allows you to understand yourself and others beings, find in the depths of the soul hidden self, turn the peculiarities of his nature to competitive advantage.

The increased use of digital tools for political activism has triggered heated debates about the effectiveness of digital campaigns for political change and feminist causes. While technology’s immediacy and transnational reach have broadened the potential impact of activism, it has, at the same time, complicated the goals, materiality, and consumption of feminist actions. In Awkward Politics, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle suggest that awkwardness offers a means of engaging with twenty-first century feminist activism by accounting for the uncertainty of popfeminist moments and movements, its sometimes illegible meanings, affects, and aesthetics. By investigating transnational media ranging from popfeminist performance art, music, street activism, blogs, and hashtags to literature, film, academic theory, and protests, the authors demonstrate that viewing activist art through the lens of awkwardness can yield a nuanced critique. By developing awkwardness into a theoretical tool for intervention, a key concept of feminist politics, and a moving target, this innovative study dramatically alters the ways in which we approach activism, its forms, movements, and effects. It also suggests a broad range of applicability, from social movements to the academy. Breaking new ground through the intersections of technology, consumerism, and the political in popfeminist work, Awkward Politics highlights the urgency of feminist politics and activism.

This book introduces the editors’ new concept of “Awkward Powers”. By undertaking a critical re-examination of the state of International Relations theorising on the changing nature of the global power hierarchy, it draws attention to a number of countries that fit awkwardly into existing but outdated categories such as “great power” and “middle power”. It argues that conceptual categories pertaining to the apex of the international hierarchy have become increasingly unsatisfactory, and that new approaches focusing on such “Awkward Powers” can both rectify shortcomings on power theorising whilst shining a much-needed theoretical spotlight on significant but understudied states. The book’s contributors examine a broad range of empirical case studies, including both established and rising powers across a global scale to illustrate our conceptual claims. Through such a novel process, we argue that a better appreciation of the de facto international power hierarchy in the 21st century can be achieved.