Documenting a labor of love: emotional labor as academic labor

Review of Communication ISSN: (Print) 1535-8593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rroc20 Documenting a labor of love: emotional labor as academic labor Brandi Lawless To cite this article: Brandi Lawless (2018) Documenting a labor of love: emotional labor as academic labor, Review of Communication, 18:2, 85-97, DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2018.1438644 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2018.1438644 Published online: 06 Mar 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 77 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rroc20 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION, 2018 VOL. 18, NO. 2, 85–97 https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2018.1438644 Documenting a labor of love: emotional labor as academic labor Brandi Lawless Department of Communication Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Neoliberal practices embedded in academia have transformed the university into a service industry. Through this lens, this review documents the current exploration of emotional labor in academia, specifically in communication studies. While a paucity of literature on this topic exists, I explore how a neoliberal agenda creates an expectation for communication faculty to perform emotional labor (and how this expectation is greater compared with other fields), the ways in which emotional labor is differentially experienced for women, and how communication studies as a gendered field exacerbates expectations to perform such labor. Moreover, I highlight the shifting perception of the field and the related moves to expand emotional labor. Finally, I discuss ways to move forward in a neoliberal academia. Received 12 January 2017 Accepted 30 October 2017 KEYWORDS emotional labor; embodiment; academic labor; neoliberalism A student wrote to me recently to say that a close family member had passed away and that she would be missing class. I wrote back to tell her what she would be missing and added a “I’m so sorry this happened,” before sending the email. Her reply suggested that I had not expressed appropriate concern and did not care enough. She explained, “As my teacher and advisor I expected that you would reach out and offer more social support.” I was shocked and hurt. I had to wonder whether she expected additional emotional labor because I am a communication studies professor, a woman, or a combination of both. My next email took a different tone and offered her the emotional caretaking that she requested. I later spent more time meeting with this student in person, to heal wounds and move forward. I chose to spend a lot of time building and maintaining this relationship—time that I felt the student expected of me. I complied with her expectations of me instead of challenging social and professional conventions that I felt uncomfortable maintaining. Despite my choices, our exchange begs the question: Within the context of academia, who is expected to undertake emotional labor? Moreover, where do these expectations come from? The conditions of academic labor in the U.S.A. are shifting under neoliberal ideologies. Higher education, which was once largely a not-for-profit model of education, is now becoming increasingly corporatized, privatized, and anti-intellectual. Henry Giroux asserts that neoliberal ideologies have redefined students as consumers and faculty as CONTACT Brandi Lawless bjlawless@usfca.edu cisco, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. © 2018 National Communication Association Department of Communication Studies, University of San Fran- 86 B. LAWLESS service providers who sell products, and ultimately, themselves.1 The corporate ethos of “do more with less” becomes a concern for all faculty, especially those on partial or short-term contracts who (re)gain employment by demonstrating exceptionalism in a meritocratic system.2 Recent scholarship on these trends focuses on academic capitalism, the race for grants, and the publish or perish phenomenon.3 Scant attention has been paid to increasing service requirements for faculty (particularly for women and people of color). Even scholarship aimed at resisting capitalist overtones in academia has focused on teaching and research.4 To date, the scholarly conversation about academic labor has largely ignored emotional labor, especially within communication studies literature. Emotional labor is an inherent part of teaching and research and should be central to discussions on academic labor and the neoliberalization of the university. While caring and emotion are a part of academic work, they are not a part of academic professionalism and training. As Antonia Darder explains, junior faculty across disciplines are now indoctrinated into a system that devalues strong teaching or research presentation and instead paints the successfully tenured candidate as one who can win grants and publish in journals that bring prestige and seed money to the university.5 This is concerning, but I would also like to add to this conundrum by pointing to further movement (for some) of academic expectations from teaching and intellectual development to caretaking. Some might ask how professional expectations within academia grew to encompass grant writing, advising, and committee work. I see that growth and also ask: How did we become caretakers, guidance and grief counselors, and life coaches in the neoliberal expansion of academia? To answer this question and those above, I explore the evolution of emotional labor through the service industry and into academia. I pay particular attention to the ways communication studies faculty (particularly women and people of color) are differentially impacted by neoliberal shifts in understandings of emotion as academic labor. Finally, I explain possible routes of action for making emotional labor more visible in academia. What is work? emotion as labor Emotional labor refers to the development, management, and performance of affective work. Such labor can include demonstrations of sympathy and empathy, one-on-one attention, supportive communication, counseling, general development of personal relationships, and making a person “feel good.” The work of Arlie Russell Hochschild is critical in understanding the trajectory of research on emotional labor.6 Hochschild explains that there are unwritten emotional expectations for individuals in service industries. These expectations discipline the employees’ own emotional experiences as well as the emotional responses toward those they serve. For example, flight attendants are encouraged to perform friendliness and happiness and offer emotional support to passengers. Blake E. Ashforth and Ronald H. Humphrey suggest that this affects the flight attendants’ sense of self because they cannot separate their professional selves from their private selves.7 Given the clear effects on the psyche of service professionals, it is important to explore further academia’s emergence as a service industry, the expectations for emotional labor in academe, and the different gendered performances attached to them. Emotional labor for employees in the “human service” industry report greater duration, intensity, and variety of emotional demands than employees in other fields.8 If emotional REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 87 labor is higher for individuals in the human service industry, then we must question whether academics fit in such a category. Recent publications on neoliberalism in higher education suggest that it is productive to theorize the academic role through a service or consumptive lens.9 Academia is now, for all intents and purposes, a service industry. Thus, the professoriate is expected to treat students as customers. All of the literature on emotional labor in service industries (the catalyst for this research) now becomes applicable to the space that academics occupy. To what extent, then, have we inherited these unwritten rules? Serving the customer (student) means extending office hours, being on-call via email and social media for emergencies, counseling the wayward and grief stricken, becoming a graduate admissions counselor, self-disclosing personal information, and exuding warmth and approachability. Much like the larger service industry, professors are likely to be rated on these emotional services through Yelp-like platforms such as ratemyprofessor.com, where “caring” is one of the top 10 tags students can assign to professors they are rating. Research on emotional labor and the service industry demonstrates key communication competencies are required to succeed at one’s job. Psychological studies might characterize the practice of emotional labor as “deep acting” and “surface acting,” where the former requires modification of feelings and the latter requires modification of outward nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions.10 One’s emotional intelligence and the ability to perform these expectations well are correlated to decreased job performance, as well as individual stress levels, job burnout, and well-being.11 Indeed, Pamela K. Adelmann found that “although workers may perform emotional labor uncomplainingly when it is required by the job, it does not do anything for their satisfaction with their work, their commitment to stay in their jobs, or their reported job performance.”12 Yet, it remains an expectation because, from a marketing perspective, emotional labor has a direct effect on “customer positive affect,” resulting in satisfaction and future consumer loyalty.13 Despite the growth of research on emotional labor and the service industry, little scholarship explicitly explores differential gendered experiences in these contexts. Scholarship on immediacy is one area that has begun to explore gendered labor practices. Instructional communication scholars have greatly expanded our understanding of immediacy behaviors in the classroom.14 Immediacy refers to relational closeness between instructors and students. It can take verbal and nonverbal forms. As such, instructors build this closeness by smiling, leaning in, dressing professionally, and making eye contact or remembering students’ names and sharing personal information. Instructional communication research has highlighted the necessity of increasing teacher immediacy as a means of improving student learning and motivation.15 Other studies link teacher immediacy and communication competence to stronger emotional outcomes for students,16 but an instructor-centered approach to understanding emotional communication has not been investigated yet. While there is an overlap between immediacy literature and emotional labor, the differences should be articulated. Immediacy behaviors draw upon subtle communication codes and communication styles—many of which are unconsciously performed—whereas emotional labor is used to identify time and attitudes toward in-depth caretaking, relationship development, and relationship maintenance. Many immediacy behaviors would not fit within this category, and arguably may present themselves naturally, given socially constructed gendered communication norms. In other words, how one communicates should 88 B. LAWLESS be distinguished from what one communicates about, how much time they spend doing this type of (additional) communication, and the toll it takes on one’s physical and mental state. This distinction is not always made clear. For example, Qin Zhang and Weihong Zhu discussed the relationship between emotional labor and burnout, but defined emotional labor as “surface acting, deep acting, and authenticity,” rather than teacher affect and vulnerability.17 A few scholars from various disciplines have begun to ask what the role of teacher emotions in the classroom is/can be, and why educators’ emotions seem taboo.18 In some circles, there even seems to be a common perception that education is inherently anti-emotional work. As Jane Kenway and Deborah Youdell argue, “Education is almost always positioned as rational—as a social and epistemological endeavor. … Emotion is not formally part of education.”19 Yet, the informal reality of emotional expectations inside and outside the classroom is daunting. Other than some work on immediacy behaviors and taboos in the classroom, research on emotional labor has not been extended to understand academia, despite its evolution as a service industry. Although emotion in the classroom continues to be a locus of inquiry, as a whole, this body of research fails to show any investigations of the differential experience of emotion with regard to gender, race, and class. Gendered emotional labor is better articulated through the research on embodied labor—a concept that makes clear how labor manifests through everyday mundane, taken-for-granted performances of self as well as through heightened performances in specially bounded communication contexts such as classrooms, workplaces, and interpersonal relationships. Embodiment marks the ways labor is felt, experienced, and enacted. The term embodiment brings together the physicality of bodies and the highly structured ways those bodies operate in the world. As Sachi Sekimoto explains, embodiment captures not how the body signifies meaning, but rather, the ways the lived realities of race, class, and gender are material.20 She states, “an individual’s corporeality—a sense of one’s bodily, material, and ontological existence—materializes through one’s physical and ideational engagement and interaction with symbolic and material worlds.”21 Relatedly, Shannon Jackson’s use of performativity helps us understand how ideologies become naturalized, internalized, and “unregistered” on bodies, producing institutionalized expectations of identity.22 Through the everyday mundane act of performing emotional labor, women’s bodies, in particular, have institutionalized labor differentials —the act of embodied labor becomes natural and such differentials are taken for granted. But the unwritten rule that women are emotional creatures is not natural; it is a carefully constructed social performance. As such, women’s subjectivities are constructed through the repetition of performing emotional labor. Scholars such as John T. Warren, Elise Lamm Pineau, and Peter McLaren have used embodiment as a term that acknowledges power as inscribed on the body and the ways in which ideologies are performed through the body.23 Given this connection, Sekimoto claims, “gendering of the body is not simply about marking it as feminine or masculine. It is also about constituting it to reiterate the gender ideologies of society.”24 The understanding of emotional labor as women’s work is one such reiteration, which disproportionately affects the type and amount of labor for which women (particularly women of color) are responsible. REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 89 Understanding labor as embodied shifts a general understanding of labor as well. Susan Foster explains that labor is traditionally conceptualized as dull, hard, paid, useful, and productive (in the sense that a product results from the work).25 Affective labor, is unpaid, sometimes invisible, and difficult to identify. Because we cannot see a tangible product of affective/emotional labor, we somehow cannot identify it as such. Yet, the market economy of the neoliberal university would falter without such work, making it a necessity. There is a paucity of literature on emotional labor with regard to gendered experiences in academia. The current communication literature on emotional labor primarily exists in management and organizational communication journals. This work extends interdisciplinary investigations into emotional labor in service industries.26 Scant attention has been paid to emotional labor within the classroom. Communication research that does address this intersection applies to niche populations such as Chinese instructors, educators in language-learning classrooms, or those teaching at “multi-cultural schools.”27 Nonetheless, these studies also found that the inherent expectations to perform emotional labor result in lack of job satisfaction, and an increased intent to leave organizations that do not clearly communicate emotional labor as a job expectation. Additionally, a broader study conducted by Jason J. Teven found a strong correlation between “teacher caring” and job burnout.28 Although these studies demonstrate the relevance of emotional labor to instructors, they do not explain why these correlations are more imperative for professors in higher education who are expected to perform emotional labor inside and outside of the classroom (because academia presents a context wherein students have access to instructors at all hours via email and course management systems). Moreover, who is expected to perform this labor? Why are some expected to do more emotional labor? Who is doing this work? gendered communication work Outside of communication research, there is a large body of literature that links gender to differential levels of emotional labor.29 The connection between emotional labor and women’s work is so well established that some literature refers to emotional tasks as “pink-collar duties.”30 This is not to say that men do not do emotional labor. However, Marcia L. Bellas explains that gendered norms are embedded in classroom practices. She states, “The association between teaching and mothering and the lower status and authority of women may cause male and female professors to experience emotional labor in the classroom quite differently.”31 She further reports that women are more likely to be evaluated based on their personalities, how often they smile, and how many personal connections they make with students. As a result, the extent to which one focuses on these communication practices may vary based on gender. Sharon M. Varallo articulates how emotional labor can be seen as an academic’s responsibility, and moreover, an expectation of women in academe. She describes this caretaker role as mothering and explains that faculty are “mandate[d] to care.”32 She explains, The vulnerable-child parenting philosophy and its resulting intensification of mothering practices has made its way into our student-centered classrooms. A shift toward intensive mothering influences college policies and programs, especially on the small college 90 B. LAWLESS campus, as many academic institutions compete for each new crop of young people with increasing expectations that we care about them and their personhood.33 Such a description draws attention to historical notions of what constitutes women’s work and this unpaid private emotional labor is embodied in mothers and “homemakers.” The expectation that women stay home has shifted, yet the idea that they perform emotional work as unpaid in the public domain has not. Instead, it has loosely translated into the market economy—women bring the embodied labor with them into their workplaces, and in their reiterative performances of emotional labors, such work has become an expectation and a measure of competence. Varallo suggests that the mandate for caring is uniquely tied to the millennial generation’s needs, claiming that mothering or caretaking became an apparent part of an academic’s role within the last decade. Moreover, Bellas explains that the “feminine” emotional labor inherent in teaching and service is not rewarded the way that “masculine” academic activities (i.e., research and administration) are.34 Such systems perpetuate the stereotype that men can shirk emotional duties in order to accomplish traditional academic tasks because women are simply better at caretaking for their students. Mary Ellen Guy and Meredith Newman refer to this phenomenon as “the penalty for caring,” specifically citing the continued wage gap between men and women, despite additional emotional labor supplied by women in human service industries.35 A wage gap of up to 29% persists between men and women in academia.36 If these findings are correct, and academics are expected to engage in mothering, then we must interrogate the gendered significance of such a role within an academic field of study with greater numbers of women teachers, such as communication studies. Teaching has long been considered a female profession, accounting for one of the few jobs that women were allowed to be paid for pre-liberation.37 While prevailing numbers that show teaching as a female-dominated profession apply predominantly to K–12 classrooms, earned doctorates were higher for females in the humanities and education fields.38 At least statistically, communication studies is a female-dominated field. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not offer data to break down the gendered employment of faculty members in the discipline (nor does the National Communication Association); however, the National Science Foundation’s most recent “Survey of Earned Doctorates” shows that 61.7% of doctorate recipients in 2014 in our discipline were female.39 More broadly, 68.4% of doctorate earners in education were female.40 A breakdown of faculty positions by gender within communication studies is unavailable. Comparatively, communication studies is a popular major41 and remains a standard course offering at liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and comprehensive universities—institutions with fewer resources and increased teaching loads. Taken together, these statistics demonstrate that teaching—perhaps within the field of communication—remains a female-identified job. Perhaps, then, communication studies has been doubly impacted by the neoliberal demands of emotional labor; the field itself has been established as one that develops emotional competency and hosts those faculty most impacted by emotional labor. Why are we doing this work? Communication studies faculty are being asked to do more with less and do more emotional labor than other fields of study. The National Communication Association REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 91 (NCA) released a 2012–2013 report that compares tenure-track positions in our field to other humanities-based disciplines.42 While more communication studies degrees are being awarded to undergraduate students than in fields such as English and history, the overall number of faculty in communication studies departments is lower and the discipline was cited as having the smallest percentage of tenured faculty compared with 11 other disciplines. Academic demands are changing as a whole. In their assessment of faculty competencies, Rania Sanford and Amy Fowler Kinch noted that faculty professional success is connected less to research and grants and more to one’s ability to connect with students, handle student trauma, and work with diverse student populations.43 This survey of 300 faculty demonstrates both the acknowledgement of the emotional labor that faculty are doing and the forecasting of shifting expectations for faculty in a neoliberal era. The expectation that faculty must be emotionally competent as part of their professional skills may be exacerbated for the field of communication. As described in a brief published by the NCA, the top learning outcome that employers describe as “very important” for employees to master is “ability to effectively communicate orally.”44 The second most important and desirable outcome is “ability to work effectively with others in teams.” These outcomes were cited on a page titled, “Why Study Communication?” I identify these as important to this discussion because communication is often marketed as a skills-based and practical major that fosters highly desirable traits that employers are looking for. Public speaking remains our “basic course,” and as a result, we are pegged as an oral communication discipline. However, if given more thought, these outcomes suggest that individuals with degrees in communication studies are more likely to possess desirable interpersonal skills than their peers in other disciplines. Our field is arguably seen and measured as relationship oriented. In terms of core competencies and general education, we are valued as a skills-based discipline—one that can teach the practical nature of public speaking and audience analysis. Another popular and common class in the discipline is interpersonal communication, which is often a requirement for an Associate of Arts transfer degree in communication studies and is more frequently being offered to students in nursing and health professions as a way to improve bedside manner. Moreover, we might consider the emphasis on empathy in interpersonal and intercultural communication classes and the longstanding prevalence of theories of self-disclosure and interpersonal communication competence in our field. Our reach is growing, and with it, the perception of our field is changing. As Bellas explains, “One’s orientation to teaching and repertoire of communication and human relations skills undoubtedly mediate the classroom experience and demands for emotional labor.”45 With more women faculty teaching lower-division courses off the tenure-track than other fields, communication studies has positioned itself within academia as uniquely suited to satisfy the demand for emotional labor. As a gendered field, we are reinscribing dominant ideologies of patriarchy that promote unpaid labor for marginalized groups. Where do we go from here? If we cannot stop neoliberalism in its tracks, then we must do something to improve our working conditions, given new and expanding expectations to do emotional labor. Adelmann argues, “If an employer especially values worker emotional labor, the way to 92 B. LAWLESS encourage it may be to offer an enlarged work role and better pay.”46 While Adelmann implies that we most focus resistance on larger systemic inquiries related to emotional labor, I argue that we must also engage in microresistance through a four-step process: (1) recognize emotional labor as academic labor; (2) document the emotional labor that you/we do; (3) continue documentation through continued scholarly pursuit; and (4) make arguments for compensation. Faculty, administrators, and students need to recognize emotional labor as academic labor, despite its invisibility in contracts or collective bargaining agreements. These expectations must not remain unwritten. In this neoliberal era, the corporatization of academic spaces fosters a workplace where “compliant workers” passively accept increased demands for time and energy.47 We must resist these trends and begin to pay attention to the ways we have acquiesced to a domineering workload disguised as human kindness or a “labor of love.” This means recognizing how dominant narratives such as “I just want to help,” or “I am here for the students,” reinforce gender norms, pay gaps, and institutional and ideological control. Recognizing emotional labor as academic labor means counting the time spent communicating with students outside of office hours—via email, after hours, on weekends, and during campus breaks. Note, I am not arguing that we should stop doing emotional labor. Indeed, pedagogy benefits from affective approaches.48 However, we as a faculty need to be honest about the “work” that we are doing, by calling it “work.” Moreover, we need to acknowledge the different emotional workloads of our diverse peers. Women, particularly women of color, reportedly do more service and more emotional labor, leading to the perception that they are unproductive or “presumed incompetent.”49 For example, some women of color describe the additional emotional labor of serving as a mentor for students of color—a role that is not formally designated but is often prompted by the fact that there is a disproportionate number of faculty of color on college campuses. Others explain the emotional costs of being tokenized as a person of color or citizen from another country who can serve as a guest speaker, diversity officer, or ambassador of multiculturalism—extended labor expectations without additional consideration of compensation.50 In recognizing the ways in which diverse faculty embody labor, we begin to acknowledge how ideological expectations are differentially constructed for some and not others. Second, formal acknowledgement of this work needs to be done through documentation. Faculty should take time to document their full work week in order to illuminate what we do and how much time we devote to it. Track not only the hours spent in the office, but also those hours spent sifting through emails and coming in for extra meetings with students. Document the types of conversations students are asking to have with you and what communicated expectations they have for you. Reporting these metrics are important for legitimizing complaints of faculty workload, and also present a case for increasing student services on campus—services that are better carried out by trained professionals rather than professors who may be unqualified “caretakers.” Through annual meetings with academic deans, career prospectus outlines, midcareer reviews, and other reporting mechanisms, faculty collectively need to make visible the emotional labor tasks that contribute to their workday. NCA could take a proactive approach in collecting such data, allowing members to report their emotional labor, which in turn could be shared with academic institutions. Tenure narratives can also include components that REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 93 indicate the overtime that faculty devote to their students with regard to emotional labor. If you are a unionized employee, bring issues of emotional labor to the collective bargaining table. Given the gender differentials discussed here, tenured faculty can use their position to advocate for junior faculty, particularly women, and more specifically women of color, who often do more of this type of unpaid labor. Documentation can begin to illuminate these added pressures, but those in positions of tenure need to be allies on the committees that document and assess “merit” and “productivity” on college campuses. Indeed, senior faculty involved in assessment need to develop emotional literacy in order to understand why emotional labor is important, how it constitutes labor, and why it must be counted as such. The neoliberal model of education continues to define productivity as student credit hours or number of publications. We cannot quietly align ourselves with a model that expects emotional work, yet does not count that work toward tenure, promotion, salary increases, or paid time off. Rather, as Mauricio Lazzarato suggests, the only way to resist and disrupt neoliberalism, is the refusal of work under such a system.51 In his arguments for resisting neoliberal definitions of academic labor, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve refers to this disruption of marketplace capitalism as the “lazy academic.”52 A movement to slow down academia has proffered that with neoliberalism comes fictitious temporal guidelines for how much work should be produced in a finite amount of time. These scholars argue, “By masking work that does not fit prescribed categories and discounting work that takes time, this accounting imperative feeds the trope of the ‘unproductive scholar.’”53 Documenting the “masked” tasks mentioned here challenges such a trope. The lynchpin for a successful slowdown movement is feminist collectivity—together we can redefine the temporality of academic labor. If, in a slowdown demonstration, the proceedings of the university are halted, then extra-ordinary labor efforts of faculty become visible to members of the larger university community. Examples of an emotional labor slowdown include letting students know via syllabus and email signature lines that you observe email-free evenings and weekends, setting timed group appointments for advising sessions, and triaging student health and wellness issues to other resources on campus. Moreover, we can make visible such a collective through regional and national pre-conferences, blogging, hashtags (e.g., #emotionalslowdown), and ongoing scholarly conversations. On my own campus, I have proposed the idea of anonymous service audits in the format of a daily schedule: 7:00 a.m.—Responded to emails that included questions about both personal and professional matters 8:05 a.m.—Arrived at my office early and student was outside crying, asking if she could “just talk” because she has nobody else that she trusts 8:42 a.m.—Preparing for my class when I get a phone call from Students with Disability Services, asking that I set up a meeting with a student who recently feels depressed These lists of a typical day for a female faculty member would be hung up on campus for administrators, peers, and students to read. Moreover, using this exercise to make visible the difference in teaching loads and positions would highlight additional differential burdens. For example, adjunct faculty might include their driving time from one campus to another as unpaid labor and a barrier to building emotional connections to 94 B. LAWLESS students and peers. This is one exercise in making emotional work visible. We can also make a concerted effort to talk to our students about our workload. This process of collective visibility can and should be applied to emotional labor, helping us to redefine work hours and expectations, for ourselves, our peers, and our students. Third, given the paucity of literature on emotional labor (particularly gendered labor), researchers within the field of communication studies must advance research on this topic. Research in this area should be multifaceted, exploring student expectations for emotional labor, the ideological underpinnings of gendered differentials in emotional work, and the material consequences for faculty. In noting that much of the communication literature that broaches emotional labor does so without regard to gender and explores contexts outside of academia, these variables should be a high priority in future research on the subject. Moreover, NCA can extend their data on the discipline by conducting research that better documents the gender and racial demographics of the field (e.g., gender breakdown for adjunct, lecturer, tenure-track, and tenured positions). The pursuit of scholarly research on emotional labor serves as an additional mode of qualitative and quantitative documentation of unwritten expectations on college campuses. Particularly, as a field, we can do a better job of understanding the subjugation that manifests in our own academic practices and move swiftly to make recommendations and changes. Finally, given the additional work that is expected of us from students, colleagues, and administrators, we must make arguments for compensation. For most academics, compensation is distributed based on teaching, research, and service. Including emotional labor in all of these categories paves the way for direct and indirect compensation such as course releases and service relief. Demonstrating extreme gaps in work hours from one colleague to the next (particularly in those cases that highlight gender divides) should also evidence the need for some faculty members to take on less formalized service commitments. In short, if we are not being fairly compensated for emotional labor, then we should reconsider how to accomplish our emotional labor in ways that promote self-care and self-promotion. Conclusion An uncertain financial future will solidify the capitalist, neoliberal hold on academia. Let us not forget that in this politicized climate, faculty members remain human beings with an emotional experience that is present inside and outside of the classroom. For communication scholars, emotional interaction and the expectation that caretaking and emotional sharing take place are more salient, valued, and in some ways, marketed. This review of emotional labor is not necessarily meant to argue that we can or should stop doing this work, but rather, to encourage faculty to name the work they are doing. If we call emotional labor work, we can begin to rethink the ways we engage university discourses that question our productivity, professionalism, and success. Notes 1. Henry Giroux, “The Corporate War Against Higher Education,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 9 (2002): 103–17. REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 95 2. Joseph M. Schwartz, “Resisting the Exploitation of Contingent Faculty Labor in the Neoliberal University: The Challenge of Building Solidarity Between Tenured and Non-Tenured Faculty,” New Political Science 36, no. 4 (2014): 504–22. 3. Mitchell Allen, “Qualitative Publishing in a Neoliberal Universe and University,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 214–20; Julianne Cheek, “Qualitative Inquiry and the Research Marketplace Putting Some +s (Pluses) in Our Thinking, and Why This Matters,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 221–26; Gary Rhoades and Blanca M. Torres-Olave, “Academic Capitalism and (Secondary) Academic Labor Markets: Negotiating a New Academy and Research Agenda,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol. 30, ed. Michael B. Paulesen (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015), 383–430. 4. Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, “The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 286–93; Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance Through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1235–59. 5. Antonia Darder, “Neoliberalism in the Academic Borderlands: An On-going Struggle for Equality and Human Rights,” Educational Studies 48, no. 5 (2012): 412–26. 6. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983); “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551–75. 7. Blake E. Ashforth and Ronald H. Humphrey, “Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity,” Academy of Management Review 18, no. 1 (1993): 88–115. 8. Céleste M. Brotheridge and Alicia A. Grandey, “Emotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of ‘People Work,’” Journal of Vocational Behavior 60, no. 1 (2002): 17–39. 9. Brandi Lawless and Yea-Wen Chen, “Multicultural Neoliberalism and Academic Labor: Experiences of Female Immigrant Faculty in the U.S. Academy,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 236–43; Andrew Morrison, “The Responsibilized Consumer Neoliberalism and English Higher Education Policy,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 197–204; Daniel B. Saunders and Gerardo Blanco Ramirez, “Resisting the Neoliberalization of Higher Education: A Challenge to Commonsensical Understandings of Commodities and Consumption,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 17, no. 3 (2017): 189–96. 10. Alicia A. Grandey, “Emotional Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualize Emotional Labor,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 5, no. 1 (2000): 95–110. 11. Ashforth and Humphrey, “Emotional Labor in Service Roles.” 12. Pamela K. Adelmann, “Emotional Labor as a Potential Source of Job Stress,” in Organizational Risk Factors for Job Stress, ed. Steven L. Sauter and R. Lawrence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1995), 371–81. 13. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau et al., “Are All Smiles Created Equal? How Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Affect Service Relationships,” Journal of Marketing 70, no. 3 (2006): 58–73. 14. David S. Fusani, “‘Extra-Class’ Communication: Frequency, Immediacy, Self-Disclosure, and Satisfaction in Student–Faculty Interaction Outside the Classroom,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 22, no. 3 (1994): 232–55; Joan Gorham, “The Relationship Between Verbal Teacher Immediacy Behaviors and Student Learning,” Communication Education 37, no. 1 (1988): 40–53; Judith A. Sanders and Richard L. 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