Webinar | Affective Labor Under COVID-19

In the face of moving entire university curriculums online in a moment's notice, faculty developers, academic technologists, and IT support staff (among others) have been called on to provide for faculty not only technical support but also emotional support while keeping a positive, brave, and supportive face for faculty in order to help ease the transition to distance delivery online. This is, as defined by Hochschild, very real emotional labor, where we are working to "induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others." The purpose of this webinar is to help us better understand affective and emotional labor, to discuss ways to help manage this kind of work and, once this crisis has passed, find ways to better recognize and reward this work.

Outcomes

• Be able to define affective labor and understand its impact on our work
• Identify strategies for coping with affective labor
• Facilitate further discussions on affective labor in the workplace