Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers

Lee Skallerup Bessette

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780700632985
• eBook ISBN: 9780700632992
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Administration de l'éducation

In her groundbreaking work The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described “emotional labor management” as follows: “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” Think of a retail worker in customer relations who must keep calm and be pleasant even when dealing with someone who is irate. While scholars have explored the affective realm when it comes to teaching and being a professor, there is less written about the experience of those working in nonteaching areas of academia—“alt-ac.”

Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers critically examines aspects of affective and emotional labor involved in alt-ac careers in higher education. This is the first and only book of its kind that focuses on affective labor and alt-ac/staff careers in higher education. Cross-profession and cross-disciplinary, the book takes seriously the invisible labor performed at our institutions by academic staff, work that is essential for the success of our students.

Research in this volume allows an opportunity for those in alt-ac careers to examine and share their affective experiences in their roles in technology, administration, research, and academic support services and as librarians, academic advisors, and writing center instructors—among others.

Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers is the third book in Kansas’s Rethinking Careers, Rethinking Academia series, which seeks projects that lead to meaningful professional development and create lasting value for graduate students, recent and experienced PhDs, university faculty and administrators, and the growing alt-ac and post-ac community.

1

“Why Would You Want to Do That?”

Managing Desire for Alt-Ac Work

TRACI FREEMAN

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In an article published in the 2004 edition of the Writing Lab Newsletter, one of the central publications for writing center administrators, Melissa Nicolas describes her experience looking for a position as a writing center director. Although she was initially optimistic that she would find a job at an institution that valued administrative work, she discovered during her campus interviews that many faculty members on search committees were deeply suspicious of her interest in administration. She writes, “The unofficial message I received was that while the institution would love to have me on staff, this or that particular faculty member cannot understand why someone with my talent or credentials would want the position.”¹ Jackie Grutsch McKinney describes having a similar experience while she was on the job market. During a campus interview, a senior faculty member asked Grutsch McKinney, “So why do you want to be a writing center director?” And then he added, “Anyone can direct a writing center.”²

While it might not be surprising that faculty outside of the writing center community question the desire for administrative work and the expertise required to do this work, even those within the community have expressed skepticism. Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, for example, recounts an experience in graduate school when she found herself seated next to a prominent writing center scholar before a conference presentation. When the scholar asked her what she wanted to do once she completed her degree, Singh-Corcoran replied that she wanted to direct a writing center. This scholar turned to her “rather matter-of-factly and asked, ‘Why would you want to do that? It’s such a low status job.”³ Singh-Corcoran describes receiving a similar response during her comprehensive exams after telling one of her committee members that she wanted to research writing centers for her dissertation work. She writes, “He didn’t exactly discourage me from pursuing writing center research, but he did tell me that if I wanted to be considered a scholar and not just an administrator (his words), my future research needed to consider more than writing centers.”⁴

As these writing center directors’ experiences illustrate, PhDs in writing studies who express a desire for administrative positions learn that we must repress our desires and our enthusiasm for this work when we talk with faculty colleagues, even in the context of job interviews. That even prominent scholars in the field question our desire for these positions speaks to the ways that writing center directors themselves have internalized an academic value system that places service work or administrative labor at the bottom of the academic prestige hierarchy. Underlying many of these comments is the widespread belief, articulated by Singh-Corcoran’s advisor, that scholarship focusing on administration is not “real” scholarship and therefore administrators are not “real” academics. As Singh-Corcoran’s experiences suggest, the process of socialization into this belief system begins early. In graduate programs, doctoral students are often taught that the roles of “administrator” and “scholar” are mutually exclusive and that research that might focus on program administration is not a serious or worthy scholarly endeavor.

Anecdotes like these are commonplace in the writing center literature. Such stories predate the rise of the alternative academic (alt-ac) class of employees in higher education,⁵ but they resonate with the experiences of many alt-ac professionals. Like other PhDs with administrative roles, writing center directors historically have inhabited positions without tenure, departmental affiliations, and research support, and, consequently, we have struggled to access traditional institutional structures of power. Regardless of our backgrounds, credentials, and even our resemblance to faculty, writing center directors have found ourselves cast in subordinate roles in relation to our faculty colleagues. Although writing centers have emerged out of a particular disciplinary and historical context, writing center directors’ experiences illustrate the need, common among alt-ac professionals, to deny, repress, or otherwise manage our desire for administrative work, particularly in the company of faculty.

In this chapter, I argue that alt-ac professionals who express a desire for administrative positions must actively manage our desires (and others’ responses to our desires) because such emotions threaten our dominant institutional narratives and unsettle structures of power in higher education. The dominant narrative about alt-ac professionals is that we fell into administrative roles by chance or were forced into these roles because of our lack of options.⁶ On our blogs and listserv posts, as well as in our casual conversations, we too often describe our professional lives through expressions of frustration, alienation, and loss. Even among other alt-ac professionals, we rarely express a desire for our work.

Throughout this chapter, I draw upon social theories of emotion to explore what the desire for alt-ac positions tells us about the social context of our institutions. As Sara Ahmed writes, “Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.”⁷ Rather than focusing on why alt-acs might desire administrative work, I am concerned about what such desires do and what they mean. The desire for administrative positions, like other expressions of illicit desire, transgresses deeply held cultural beliefs and values and entails significant personal risk. This risk is apparent in the many posts on alt-ac listservs and message boards asking for advice on how to tell your advisors that you want to pursue an alt-ac position. To mitigate this risk, alt-ac professionals must manage our desires through acts of denial, repression, and self-silencing.

In the pages that follow, I consider how alt-ac professionals who desire administrative positions occupy an interesting vantage point from which to critique institutional power structures. Next, I analyze some of the emotion management strategies that alt-acs employ to negotiate daily interactions in our institutional contexts. Finally, I reflect on this analysis for the insight it provides into the well-established economies of knowledge and power in our institutions.

ALT-ACS AND THE MEANING OF DESIRE

In my analysis, I adopt a fairly narrow definition of alt-ac positions, one exemplified by writing center directors. I want to acknowledge, however, that what constitutes an alt-ac career track or an alt-ac professional is still very much a subject of debate. Brenda Bethman and C. Shaun Longstreet, for example, define as alt-ac those positions in higher education for full-time or administrative staff in which research and teaching are not among the primary duties. Within this broad definition, alt-ac positions can be found across universities, as well as outside of academe in institutes, foundations, museums, and think tanks.⁸ I find this definition problematic for what it excludes—the work of research and teaching—as well as for what it includes, which is virtually any job outside of the corporate sector that a person with a PhD might have.

In contrast to Bethman and Longstreet’s broad definition, Joshua Kim describes alt-ac careers as “non-faculty educational positions” (emphasis mine).⁹ By calling attention to the educational aspects of alt-ac work, Kim makes an important distinction between PhDs who work in professional fields and those who work in higher education off the tenure track but in roles that require them to blend teaching with service and scholarship. As Kim argues, the defining feature of an alt-ac position is that it is “liminal,” rest[ing] somewhere between non-faculty and faculty.” “This matters,” he writes, “as even highly productive alt-acs working in high impact roles lack many of the protections and privileges of traditional faculty.”¹⁰ Although alt-ac positions often entail much of the same work as tenure-track faculty positions, alt-acs are situated outside of the traditional categories and institutional power structures for professionals who typically engage in this work.

Like Kim, I view alt-ac professionals’ resemblance to faculty as critical to the definition of the category. Alt-acs have the same training as faculty. Many of us possess expertise in the areas of teaching, research, and service, and our work requires us to engage our expertise, although perhaps in different ways than faculty. Many of us have stellar academic credentials and are as well-published as our tenure-track and tenured peers. Precisely because of our similarities, as Ji-Young Um notes, “the presence of so many of us in the margins of the academy—the visibility of our bodie...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. “Why Would You Want to Do That?”
• 2. What’s Love Got to Do with It?
• 3. Affective Allyship
• 4. When Is an Academic Not an Academic?
• 5. You’re OK, I’m Always OK
• 6. Plays Well with Others
• 7. The Difficulties of Removing the Pink Collar
• 8. Affective Labor and the Balancing Act for Women in Academic Technology
• 9. Emotional Labor in Open Access Librarianship
• 10. Telling Alternate Stories
• 11. Both Student and Employee
• 12. Leaning toward Joy
• 13. Honoring Others by Honoring Ourselves
• 14. More Denial, More Problems
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover