Understanding Awkwardness through the Frame of Familiar Urban Life.

Abstract

This thesis weaves a story of the awkward experiences of the past 8 months of a 22-year- old woman outside the comfort of her home, shown through her eyes. The setting of the narrative is centred around the woman and her sense of awkwardness, particularly in two spaces that she has been going to since her childhood, which is why the story begins with some background on the spaces of Tripuri Town and Bhupindra Road. The two spaces are close to her in two senses – one is that they hold special meaning to her because of her life experiences in those spaces, and the other is their easy accessibility. The point to note is that the story is not about these spaces but the relation of awkwardness with these spaces. For this project, the woman went out of her comfort zone and observed her sense of discomfort with being in familiar public spaces. This sense of discomfort revealed the emotions she felt in a specific space with other people in it, which brought awkwardness to the surface. Awkwardness is a human experience of a particular discomfort that is often not visible or is made to be so with conscious efforts, and every person is familiar with it, but depending on the context, its experience differs among different individuals. An awkward experience for a woman may not be awkward for a man. What makes a certain woman awkward may not be awkward for another woman. So, it becomes necessary to figure out this “what” that makes one awkward but not another if one aims to study awkwardness, and that is exactly what the project has attempted to do. The starting point of inquiry is immediate awkwardness, which is then studied in reference to a particular situation, leading to its mediation through this thesis in the form of a combination of text and image. Awkwardness has two necessary components: discomfort and presence out of place, which uniquely interact with an individual’s identity. The narrative built by the vignettes and anecdotes of the awkward experiences explores how to visualize awkwardness and aims to study ‘awkwardness’, not from a psychological perspective, but from a social perspective, through a feminist lens..