Emotional Labor Required of Graduate Students
As doctoral student workers, many of us hold teaching, research, and student responsibilities. In these varied roles, implicit expectations regarding our emotional behavior and self-management might arise. As individuals whose energy and attention are often pulled in many directions, the concept of emotional labor is a valuable tool for assessing the demands of our working environments. A deeper understanding of emotional labor can help determine when and how to set and reiterate boundaries around your time and energy as a doctoral student.
Emotional labor is a term that first emerged in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work The Managed Heart, which explored how human feelings are dealt with in commercial and workplace contexts. In this book, Hochschild refers to regulating or managing expressions of emotions with others as a part of one’s professional work role (think: restaurants requiring servers to provide “service with a smile”). Emotional labor is often gendered, and is frequently enforced or expected within professional roles deemed feminine.
Given the constraints and power differentials faced by doctoral students in social work graduate schools, many of us may be required to perform emotional labor as a means of professional survival. Sometimes, we opt into self-censorship and pleasantries as a mechanism for maintaining and building the networks necessary to advance in academia. We may further learn to navigate the bounds of being asked to speak up and express our concerns or opinions, knowing there is no safety net to fall back on if these views are perceived negatively.
As instructors and researchers, our work with students and professors alike involves a mix of training and mentoring in addition to the research and teaching tasks we take on. As a result, our work is often couched within multiple professional relationships. Determining when and how to set boundaries in those relationships is a challenging task that is often made more difficult by power dynamics and identity-based oppression.
So often, graduate students’ labor isn’t acknowledged as labor, as we’re often tasked with conducting free labor in exchange for gratitude for an experience. This underlying expectation exacerbates the emotional labor students face, negotiating the ability to say “no” to a request without fear of backlash. This negotiation also comes into play when a student receives competing requests or feedback, alongside feelings of safety in expressing confusion to avoid being viewed as a burden, or less competent than other students. Further, students may not receive timely and/or appropriate guidance or feedback, leaving them questioning their abilities.
The underlying values of colonization and white supremacy present in academia lend themselves to feeling that negative emotions are a personal flaw, as opposed to a response to a social condition. Students, instead, choose to engage in conventionally permitted emotions (Madden & Tarabochia, 2020), serving the interests of the academy as a means of self-preservation. Expectations of productivity can also increase the emotional labor toll, feeling that one must continuously be producing and adhering to arbitrary deadlines, and “keeping up” with those around them.
Doctoral students rarely have the status and resources of their faculty mentors and advisors. Though this may be generally known, its impacts are not sufficiently addressed in the academy. The academy requires restructuring in order to better attend to the emotional burdens placed onto graduate student workers. As faculty, staff, and peers, we must be aware of perpetuating situations that explicitly or implicitly ask students to fracture their personal boundaries and relationships or censor themselves. Clarifying our role in any given professional or educational situation is a mechanism for preventing emotional overload. Another strategy is to ask for consent and use trigger warnings/trauma reminders in classroom contexts. Through integrating practices like these, we are capable of setting a different tone for current and future graduate student workers, one that promotes boundaries and sustainability.
Reference
Madden, S., & Tarabochia, S. L. (2020). Emotional labor, mentoring, and equity for doctoral students and faculty writers. In Bartlett, L. E., Tarabochia, S. L., Olinger, A. R.. & Marshall, M. E. (Eds.), Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum: IWAC at 25. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2020.0360