Emotions & Work

This conference is organised by Drs Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds from the ‘Living with Feeling’ project at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary University of London and is generously funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Historical Society.

Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds

The term ‘emotional labour’ was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart. Emotional labour, as she conceived it, referred to the work of managing one’s own emotions required by certain occupations. Recently, the term’s popularity has grown. Google searches have increased, and the concept has gained currency (perhaps ubiquity) in academic and public discourse. In a 2017 <A HREF="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">article</A> for Harper’s Bazaar,  journalist Gemma Hartley used the term to describe the household management and life admin undertaken largely by women, which she argued reflected and perpetuated gender inequalities.
 
In an <A HREF="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">interview</A> published in The Atlantic in 2018, Hochschild lamented the ‘concept creep’ of emotional labour. The journalist Julie Beck summarised the concern that, ‘The umbrella of emotional labour has grown so large that it’s starting to cover things that make no sense at all, such as regular household chores which are not emotional so much as they are labour, full stop’.
 
This one-day <A HREF="https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Emotions-and-Work-CFP.pdf" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">interdisciplinary conference</A> seeks to explore the troubled relationship between emotions and labour. 
 
We are pleased to announce that Professor Claire Langhamer will deliver the conference keynote address. Professor Langhamer is a social and cultural historian. Her work deals with the diverse ways in which ordinary people negotiated modernity in twentieth-century Britain. She is currently working on a project, ‘Feelings at Work’, which investigates the intersections between work and emotion in England over the last 100 years. It explores feelings about paid employment; the emotional impact of employment; paid and unpaid emotional labour; and the management of feeling within specific workplaces and occupational sectors.
 
As Langhamer observed in her 2016 <A HREF="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2015.1123025?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=rwhr20" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">article</A>, ‘while historians have developed new concepts for understanding emotions in the past…there has been little attempt, as yet, to use emotion as a category of analysis within the history of work in the late modern epoch’. We are interested in exploring how we might use a history of emotions framework or methodology in the study of work and labour.
 
Provisional Programme
9:00-9:15 - Registration and Coffee
9:15-9:30 – Welcome
9:30-10:30 - Keynote
Professor Claire Langhamer, Mass Observing feelings at work from 1947 to 2010
10:30-12:00 - Panel One: Occupational Spaces
<OL>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Grace Whorrall-Campbell, Gender, emotional labour and emotion management in British chain stores, c.1920-1950</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Sally Horrocks and Paul Merchant, Emotions at work in science: the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, 1950-1980 </LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Philip Begley, ‘As I look back now…’: Emotions and nostalgia amongst hospital administrators </LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, The 'System' of service: emotional labour and the theatrical metaphor</LI>
</OL>
12:00-12:45 - Lunch
12:45-14:15 - Panel Two: Emotional Bonds
<OL>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Chris Pearson, More-than-human emotional labour: working with dogs in London, New York and Paris, c.1800-1939</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Claudia Soares, ‘Lifelong mothers and fathers’: the emotional labour of institutional childcare in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1850-1930</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Richard Hall, Masculinity and emotional labour within and beyond the workplace in post-war Britain</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Sarah Spence, Love, work and postnatal depression in Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011)</LI>
</OL>
 14:15-14:30 - Break
 14:30-16:00 - Panel Three: Emotions, Politics and Power
<OL>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Mary V. Wrenn, “From mad to mindful: corporate control through corporate mindfulness”</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">George J. Severs, The ‘moving politics’ of HIV/AIDS work</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Claire English, The hardest job in the world?: the (emotional) labour of ‘motherly’ love in neoliberal Britain</LI>
</OL>
16:00-16:15 - Break
 16:15-17:45 - Panel Four: Professional and Personal Identities
<OL>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Daniel Jenkin-Smith, ‘I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not’: Charles Lamb’s ‘The Superannuated Man’, and the pleasures and pains of quitting</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Hannah Parker, ‘Would it not be more honest on my part to say that I am not fit for purpose and leave?’: education, labour and self-worth in women’s letters to Soviet authorities, 1924-1941’</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Jessica Gray, Office intimacies: the secretary’s emotional labour in The Judge and Lilian</LI>
<LI CLASS="MsoNormal">Naomi Hetherington, ‘My emotions […] They’re total assets!’: emotion work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer </LI>
</OL>
 17:45-18:00 - Closing Remarks
 18:00-19:30 - Drinks Reception

The Art Workers' Guild

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