Text versus Audience: Where Does Cringe Emerge?

Interview with Associate Professor Irena Reifova

Abstract

This interview with Irena Reifova (Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Charles University Prague) examines cringe as both a cultural and an affective phenomenon. Rather than treating it as a purely subjective reaction, Reifova locates cringe within group identities, social hierarchies, and the aesthetic norms that neoliberalism has naturalized as common sense — arguing that its biological roots tell us relatively little about why specific things, in specific contexts, feel cringeworthy. The conversation works through several methodological difficulties that cringe research faces: the instability of digital content over time, the polysemy of cringe texts, and the uncomfortable fact that researchers are not neutral observers of the phenomenon they study — a problem Reifova addresses through autoethnographic reflexivity. The interview ends by asking whether cringe culture and contemporary populism are, at bottom, expressions of the same exhaustion with elite norms.

Irena Reifova is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media Studies, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research and teaching interests are in cultural studies, theory of popular culture, television studies, and post-socialist mediated memory. Her methodological focus is on qualitative methodology. She was a founding member and later Vice­‑Chair of ECREA Central and East­‑European Network. Irena Reifova served on the Management Committee of COST Action IS0609, Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, from 2011 to 2014, and was a principal leader of two nationally funded research projects. She publishes her research nationally and internationally in edited books and peer-reviewed journals. She is a member of the editorial board of CM: Communication Management Quarterly (Serbia), Iluminace (Czech Republic), and Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research (de Gruyter). She has served as ECREA General Secretary from 2016 to 2021 and ECREA Vice­‑President from 2021 to 2024.