Documenting Emotional Labor

Abstract

This essay builds on Lawless’s call to name and chronicle emotional work. The authors draw attention to the emotional labor that has become an institutional expectation of the academic position, particularly among people with marginalized identities, to name this labor as such and to use this documentation as evidence for compensation. The authors’ emotional labor is grounded in critical communication pedagogy (CCP), which compels them to engage in a fundamentally different form of emotional labor, one that depends on relationship-building and the recognition of systemic and structural forms of oppression through reflexive care and performative listening. This form of emotional labor strives to understand people in context to account for how experiences are always enabled and constrained by various institutional structures and to generate possibilities for change. The authors offer autoethnographic accounts of their CCP-centered emotional labor, and then draw conclusions from a critical communication pedagogy perspective.

Caring for our graduate academy

“…We are constantly pressured to publish more, secure more funding, teach additional courses, develop new courses, and encourage our graduate students to do the same. We also perform an uncanny number of invisible hours mentoring and providing emotional support for our studentsundocumented labor that does not count towards our formal annual reviews (Cummins & Huber, 2022). We are constantly told that "we could do more," and our "reward" for good work is always more work, a consequence of an academic system imprinted by corporatist and neoliberalism ideals (Ellis, 2021).…”