Mapping emotional labor in our Writing Center

The field of Writing Center Studies has recently introduced emotional labor as a topic of conversation in its scholarship. I was introduced to emotional labor, a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to define the act of workers masking their emotions to present an externally acceptable presentation, in my Writing Center Studies class. I immediately recognized emotional labor happening in our Center, as conversations of it (though not naming it as such) were frequent in our backroom. Emotional labor is a phenomenon that goes unnamed almost as often as it occurs in Writing Centers, and this implicitness seems to be the scholarship’s main concern.

My current project is to create a heuristic from this inventory based on Suhr-Sytsma and Brown in “Theory In/To Practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center.” Through my research, I’ve determined that one of the better ways to account for emotional labor is to utilize a model that can be easily replicated across Centers: creating an inventory. Because emotional labor is a very personal phenomenon, attempting to study it from an outside perspective may prove problematic and overly complicated. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown deliver a “two-list heuristic” that demonstrates the often-subtle oppressive language that occurs in writing center spaces for readers to apply in their own Centers. They claim that the locality of their results is a strength, as they don’t claim to be an authoritative figure on the subject. I take inspiration from this model is a useful deliverable, but we hope to have the funds and time to conduct a larger-scale study. With a local inventory of our Center’s emotional labor patterns, I hope to be able to offer a number of possible trends and coping mechanisms to the field.

To get this process started, I recently created an open-ended survey to begin this process, and the data I’ve gathered so far attests to a need for further naming and studying of emotional labor. This has helped me to identify patterns that have been recognized in Writing Center scholarship, but also outliers that suggest we have more work to do.

The major patterns I’ve seen thus far include the importance of talking to other consultants as a coping mechanism and that the most emotionally charged labor is being performed in sessions with unresponsive or stressed writers. This indicates both the importance of our 50-minute sessions (to allow ten minutes to write a report and decompress), but also helps guide how future consultants might be prepared during our trainings to manage the emotional work of consulting with unresponsive writers.

Some of my findings aligned with existing emotional work. For example, our consultants tend to experience what one called “second-hand stress,” but must mask these feelings of anxiety for their writer in order to encourage them in the session. However, there were also some surprises. The most unique finding is that a consultant stated she performs emotional labor the most when she identifies with the writer to some degree, namely if they remind her of a loved one. This was a response I had not come across in my research, gesturing to the idea that there are countless reasons for performing emotional labor that are not yet named.

Many writing centers do not train consultants for the inevitable performance of emotional labor, ours included. This is what led me to begin this project to create a replicable inventory of emotional labor performance in our center. Creating inventories and heuristic models of emotional labor performance may be useful to you in your Writing Center because they can serve as the basis for various types of research. If there’s a pattern you feel happening in your specific writing center, maybe due to factors such as the staff’s gender or racial makeup, the size of your center, or any other special elements, an inventory would allow you to have information about emotional labor in your particular center that you may not see represented in Writing Center scholarship writ large.

Our hope is to use this inventory to provide more tailored training materials or a heuristic model that can be shared across hiring cycles. Ultimately, you can simply start an open dialogue about emotional labor among your consultants. They may already be talking about it without naming it as such, but by doing so, you validate those conversations as worthy of study and demonstrate care for the well-being of your staff.