Emotional labor, ordinary affects, and the early childhood education and care worker

Nikki Fairchild and Eva Mikuska

Gender, Work and Organization, 2021, vol. 28, issue 3, 1177-1190

Abstract: This paper discusses society's lack of recognition of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workforce as professionals, and its emotional impact that this deficit has on them. The concerns are that the role of the ECEC worker has been mainly conceptualized as maternal, where emotional labor is taken for granted and needs to be suppressed or harnessed as part of the caring role. This is at odds with successive government policy agenda which has focused on professionalizing the workforce. In this paper, we engage with qualitative data gathered from 24 experienced ECEC workers to explore the impact that “affect” has upon them. In this respect, we build on the theorizations of Massumi and Stewart, which connect affect theory with emotional labor; we argue that affect theory offers different ways to consider how objects, spaces, material, and discursive entities and bodies impact ECEC workers' emotions and emotional labor.

Date: 2021
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