The Emotional Labor of Diversity Work for Graduate Students

• In Event: Emotional Labor: Examining Implications for Justice, Wellbeing, and Development for Minoritized Students and Faculty

Abstract

To lay the groundwork for symposium attendees, we define, relate, and extend key concepts from the emotional labor (EL) theoretical tradition through a comparative case study of 24 current or former PhD students across four high-diversity STEM PhD programs. We find that underrepresented students perform emotional labor to secure their sense of belonging in academic communities and to contribute to their programs’ diversity and equity efforts. Contextual norms dictate unique sets of “feeling rules,” or “the appropriate type and amount of feeling that should be experienced in a particular situation” (Wharton, 2009, pp. 148-149). Perceived feeling rules in these programs marked outward emotional responses to racism or sexism as deviant and unwelcome, and underrepresented students thus suffered emotional distress from suppressing the feelings such incidents provoked (“emotional dissonance”).

We argue that diversity work in higher education must not be narrowly conceived of as organized, sponsored activity, but also as a current of micro-level interactions whose qualities disproportionately-- often negatively-- affect the wellbeing of the communities that diversity initiatives are designed to include. In addition to these instances of what Hochschild (1979) called “surface acting”, students are also burdened with managing private feelings about belonging and adequacy. Some found respite from emotional dissonance through interactions with supportive individuals in their programs or by creating student networks whose feeling rules allowed for open emotional expression.

Authors

• Kamaria Porter, University of Michigan

• Julie Posselt, University of Southern California

• Kimberly A Reyes, University of Michigan