Navigating emotional labour in grad school

Emotional labour is the management of emotions performed as part of one’s role. It can relate to managing our own emotions or that of another person. Emotional labour is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does present many challenges.

Graduate students frequently engage in emotional labour as a core part of their work, but it often goes unnoticed and has disproportionately negative impacts on students with marginalized identities.

While doing my PhD research on the politics of higher education, I had the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with past and present doctoral students. Many of them spoke about the different types of emotional labour they found themselves shouldering:

Peer support.

Students form strong bonds with each other that are crucial to their mental health. This community building isn’t just for personal gain, it’s greatly beneficial to our institutions. Said one PhD candidate about being a peer mentor: “[Students] are coming in and have the same fears and anxieties and stresses that I had. … They are now sharing all of those with me and asking for advice. I have to both relive my own trauma related to some of those experiences, and also find ways to try and make it seem more manageable for them.”

Managing up.

Students manage the expectations of their supervisors, committee members and others who can impact their progress. While interviewing a non-binary student, they described the emotional labour of working with a supervisor. The supervisor not only wouldn’t get their pronouns right, but even went so far as to expect the student to write an article while recovering from gender-affirming surgery.

Professional development.

Sometimes emotional labour is explicit, while other times it is communicated as an unwritten rule. At a practice presentation for her very first conference, one student was asked an inappropriate question by an audience member. She was told by her supervisor, “sometimes you need to eat the s*** sandwich.” Whether or not this was good advice, it’s an example of how students learn norms and expectations for emotion management.

Teaching.

We also manage emotion in classrooms as teaching assistants and principal instructors. One student reflected on changing their tone and demeanor to seem more likeable. Reflecting further on the gendered nature of this performance, she said “I would hide how physically ill I was from anxiety. I even dressed a certain way because I didn’t want to be accused of leading my male students on. … that’s just the way it is.”

Many higher education professionals are dedicated to improving the graduate student experience and engendering a future workforce with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed, so what can be done to support graduate students in emotional labour?

• Make it visible. Invite graduate students into reflective, ongoing conversations about their emotional labour. If you observe a student performing emotional labour, tell them that you recognize it. You can also share your own experience of emotional labour with students. This will require vulnerability, but the results will be worth it for everyone.
• Be a good ally. Work in partnership with students to understand how the norms, expectations and impacts of emotional labour vary across diverse groups. Advocate for changes that will decrease negative health outcomes and make this work more equitably distributed.
• Offer compensation. Think creatively about how to compensate graduate students for this kind of work. It will not be a simple accounting procedure, but there may be more possibilities than you think.
• Enhance training. Increase programming to educate students about emotional labour and offer them skills to successfully do this work. This might include building existing programs with explicit content on emotional labour.
• Talk about boundaries. Taking care of others requires us to take care of ourselves. Ask students about what boundaries they need to maintain good health and continually encourage them to exercise those boundaries. You may also choose to share your boundaries with them.

Meagan Auer is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Alberta, and a community engagement facilitator at MacEwan University.

The ideas expressed here build on the insights of Loleen Berdahl and Christie Schultz, the stories shared with me over the course of my fieldwork and my own experience in higher education.