Affective Labor: The Need for, and Cost of, Workplace Equanimity

After a week (or longer, for some), the rush at my institution to move the entire course catalog into a distance-learning format has abated. In a rare moment of calm during all of this, my colleagues and I joked that we never thought that the services we—the faculty developers, instructional designers, and academic technologists in the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship—provide would be considered "essential services" on campus. But there we were, at the epicenter, leading our entire campus in the efforts to ensure instructional continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We maintained a positive attitude. We kept our patience as we explained (again) how to set up a Zoom meeting and ensure that the host was indeed logged in. We collaborated with colleagues and faculty who were worried, scared, stressed, concerned, angry, and sad. We maintained professionalism when we were asked and asked and asked to do more, to pivot, to hurry, to fix, to solve, and to create. We remained calm and collected as we reassured faculty whenever something technological went horribly (and inevitably) wrong, and then we worked quickly with providers to fix it. We held back our concern when we were asked to work from home—relieved that we were safe but saddened that we were separated from the professional support community we had grown to rely on during this trying time.

We did all of this while maintaining the classes that we teach and while dealing with our own personal challenges—adjusting to our kids and spouses being at home and worrying about our elderly parents or immunocompromised friends and relatives. But you never would have known about any of that in our day-to-day interactions with faculty and administrators. All you would have seen was a high level of professionalism, collaboration, openness, willingness, and positivity.

Folks, I am exhausted.

I am exhausted not only because I have been going nonstop, weekends included, to help with this transition but also because of the affective labor that has been asked of us over these past few weeks and will continue to be asked of us moving forward. In her groundbreaking book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild defines emotional labor as work that is done to "induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others."¹ Her book is foundational for understanding emotional and affective labor. It also perfectly describes the kind of intensive work we have been asked to perform these past few weeks, as well as the kind of labor we typically and invisibly do even in less stressful periods.

When I first started my career in faculty development and academic technology, I was struck by the different types of work that I was expected to perform, and I had difficulty articulating why I was struggling with certain aspects of the job, and why it was proving to be so taxing. I knew the technology and the pedagogy inside and out, so why was I not thriving? True to my academic roots, I started to read and research. As is often the case, librarians were some of the first "service" professionals at universities to explore the notion of affective labor in the work performed by instructional designers, faculty developers, and academic technologists. I first encountered the term in the article "Not Your DH Teddy-Bear" by Paige Morgan.² It was a relief to finally have language for what I was experiencing and for what I was feeling.

I now knew what I should be researching and reading. This led me to read an article by Alexis Logsdon, Amy Mars, and Heather Thompson about the emotional labor of being "betwixt and between" as digital librarians.³ When I shared that article with one of my colleagues, she almost burst into tears, as what the authors described exactly matched her own experience. The more people in our fields that I spoke to about the article, the more people thanked me for giving them the language to articulate their experiences—and the validation they never received for that important aspect of their work.

All of this led me to edit Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers, a collection of essays bringing together the experiences, stories, and insights from staff across campus, including those in academic technology.⁴ These conversations are just starting in our respective professions. My hope with the book is to move conversations around affective labor more to the forefront of our professional lives.

I could not have imagined that my research and book would become so essential for understanding our professional work in the current moment. That is to say, what you are doing is work, real work—work that deserves to be recognized, compensated, and celebrated. To those of you who are struggling to put into words what you are feeling and who have rarely considered the elements of feeling and emotion that are required of you, please know that you are not alone, and that there is language for what you are experiencing. For those of you who are in supervisory and leadership positions, please acknowledge and validate what your colleagues are experiencing right now.

When this moment is over, we will have an opportunity to have more productive conversations as to how this kind of work can be properly recognized, rewarded, and compensated, but for now, know that what you are experiencing is normal. It is also part of the work. Let's name it as such.

Notes

1. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): p. 7. ↩
2. Paige Morgan, "Not Your DH Teddy-Bear," DH+Lib, July 29, 2016. ↩
3. Alexis Logsdon, Amy Mars, and Heather Tompkins, "Claiming Expertise from Betwixt and Between: Digital Humanities Librarians, Emotional Labor, and Genre Theory," College & Undergraduate Libraries 24, no. 2–4 (2016): 155–170. ↩
4. Lee Skallerup Bessette, ed., Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, expected 2021). ↩

---

Lee Skallerup Bessette is a Learning Design Specialist at Georgetown University.