BiblioVault - Books about Emotional Labor

Naming How We Feel

Specific Affect and Emotional Labor In the Writing Center

Daniel Lawson

Utah State University Press, 2026

Writing centers are the locus for a wide range of emotional labor on campus, often serving students beyond the typical educational purpose. Naming How We Feel grapples with the question of how writing center administrators account for, train for, and theorize emotion and affect in the writing center to facilitate better and more ethical practices and considers how writing center administrators might ameliorate the costs of such emotional labor to faculty, tutors, and students.

Beginning with a discussion of how writing center scholars might identify and understand emotional labor, the book then expands to examine richly varied case studies and anecdotes to showcase how tutors tend to experience such labor and consider its relationship and association with emotional intelligence and burnout. Lawson considers how the field might better prepare and train tutors for affect and emotional labor, ultimately advocating for more equitable conditions for emotional labor within writing centers.

Naming How We Feel examines the critical role feelings play in writing and writing center work, offering advice on training tutors for emotional labor and literacy and suggestions for how administrators might engage institutional stakeholders to create and support more equitable conditions for emotional labor within their writing centers.

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Pathways to Empathy

New Studies on Commodification, Emotional Labor, and Time Binds

Edited by Gertraud Koch and Stefanie Everke Buchanan

Campus Verlag, 2013

Three decades after the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, the processes of commodification of emotion she wrote about now reach into all areas of labor processes, extending even to private life and intimate relationships. The contributors to this volume take up her concepts to study the diversity of this economic intrusion into family, education, and nursing in the service sector as well as into corporate management. Aside from the powers and interests that force these developments, these essays argue, there are also productive uses and active resistances to them.

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The Wages of History

Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines

Amy M. Tyson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

Anyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets while dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota's Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant observation, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies.

Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilege—an opportunity to connect with the public in meaningful ways through the medium of history—the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace.

This case study also offers insights—many drawn from the author's seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snelling—into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history's front lines both resist and embrace the site's more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide.

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