The Emotional Labor of Precarity: Preparing Students for Life After College

• In Event: Precarity and Responsibility: (Re)producing Difference in Higher Education

Abstract

In order to retain students and prepare them for life after college, university administrators highly encourage academic advisors to carry out gendered constructions of care while advising undergraduates. To do so, advisors perform the gendered practice of emotional labor in which they suppress or express feelings they think will better equip students for the precariousness of post-college life. Advisors take on a maternalistic role in comforting students’ anxieties about the future and nurturing students’ professional and personal development. This paper seeks to understand the emotional labor of precarity as enacted by advisors and explore students’ responses to this gendered practice.

Presenter

• Denise Goerisch, University of Wisconsin, Madison