Emotional Labor in Academia: Burdens, Metrics, and Compensation

Citation:
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

I started reading what is considered to be the seminal treatise on emotional labor, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, a few months ago. This book so resonated with me that I found I wanted to note and respond to about 10 things on every page. Since that takes a lot of time and energy, I am only about 30 pages in so far.

The main thing this book has awakened in me is a strong interest in understanding what emotional labor is (essentially, it is the regulation and suppression of your own emotions in response to customer needs and expectations when performing a service-oriented job) and how it shapes workplace culture and interactions.

Brandi Lawless’s 2018 article focuses on the impact of emotional labor in academia, which is a subject I have been thinking about throughout my career, especially in the last year or so. Although Professor Lawless is a communications professor and not a librarian, I recognized myself and my librarianship practice in which she writes here.

Continue reading →

Librarians and Cultural Humility: Check Your Privileges and Recognize Your Biases

Citation:
Twanna Hodge, Integrating Cultural Humility into Public Services Librarianship, INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION & LIBRARY REVIEW, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2019.1629070.

This article was written by the first-ever Diversity Resident Librarian at the University of Utah library. In it, the author challenges public services librarians to explore and address their implicit biases, and to incorporate cultural humility in their librarianship practice.

Of course, this type of exercise in self-auditing and vulnerability can be difficult and uncomfortable for people who engage in it. As the author points out, some of our most pervasive biases develop on a subconscious level from the time we are very young, as we process messages and opinions about the world, other people, and other cultures that we get from our families, our friends, and others. These types of biases, which include “both favorable and unfavorable assessments” are, as the author notes, “pervasive.” However, this does not mean that they have to be permanent.

Continue reading →

“Why do people trust algorithms?”

Citation:
Veronika Alexander, Collin Blinder, and Paul J. Zak, Why Trust an Algorithm? Performance, Cognition, and Neurophysiology, Computers in Human Behavior 89 (2018) 279-288, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.026.

As a librarian, I am interested in information behavior. I am not a computer scientist or a programmer, so my knowledge about the intricacies of algorithms is minimal. But I try to inform myself where I can.

I found this study to be helpful because it addressed how trust in algorithms affects behavior. The authors conducted a study in which they measured participants’ neurophysiological responses to gain a better understanding of people’s perception of the trustworthiness of algorithms. Their hypothesis? “Higher algorithm accuracy and greater prior use by others would result in higher algorithm adoption … (and) social proof would influence adoption more than algorithm accuracy information.”

Continue reading →

Information Marginalization, Information Inequity, and Information Poverty

Citation:
Amelia N. Gibson and John D. Martin III, Re-Situating Information Poverty: Information Marginalization and Parents of Individuals With Disabilities, JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 70(5):476–487, 2019, DOI: 10.1002/asi.24128

I didn’t realize how strong my own biases were in thinking about this topic. Perhaps some of this comes from, as the authors point out, the fact that, in the past, studies like this sought to explore “information poor” people. These types of studies focus on the behavior of marginalized people rather than the institutional standards and practices that not only cause information poverty among certain demographics, but also seem to accept and encourage it.

Reader, my eyes have been opened…

According to the authors, the preferred focus on these types of studies should be “information marginalization,” which they define as “systematic, interactive socio-technical processes that can push and hold certain groups of people at social ‘margins,’ where their needs are persistently ignored or overlooked.” People who are information marginalized suffer from systemic causes of information poverty, which primarily result from a lack of resources, both technical and educational, that many people take for granted.

Continue reading →

“Subjective Senses” in Psychology

Citation:
Fernando L. Gonzales Rey, Subjectivy and Discourse: Complementary Topics for a Critical Psychology, Culture and Psychology, 2019, Vol. 25(2) 178-194, DOI: 10.1177/1354067X18754338.

I am not a psychologist, but I have long been interested in how personality, thoughts, motivations, and emotions affect behavior, especially regarding how we interact with and respond to others. This comes partially from my own experience in psychotherapy, through which I learned a lot about myself and why certain people and life situations create in me a lot of anxiety, confusion, frustration, and anger.

I am also working on a paper right now in which I am exploring the acculturation process of foreign students, and how the acculturation experience can shape the student’s experience with scholarly research during their time abroad. During my research for this paper, I found myself drawn to articles about culture and subjectivity. That is why I decided to pick this article for today’s Daily Read.

Continue reading →

Perceptions of Non-Native Speakers

Citation:
Shedding New Light on the Evaluation of Accented Speakers: Basic Mechanisms Behind Nonnative Listeners’ Evaluations of Nonnative Accented Job Candidates, Janin Roessel, Christiane Schoel, Renate Zimmermann, and Dagmar Stahlberg, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2019, Vol. 38(1) 3–32, DOI: 10.1177/0261927X17747904.

Well.

This article immediately piqued my interest for several reasons: (a) I have given presentations and lectures as a non-native speaker of German a few times before; (b) I am always terrified of being judged as incompetent when I speak German in a situation like this, even though a lot of people tell me my German accent is relatively slight (especially for an American); and (c) I work with non-native English speakers all the time and I wanted to explore some of the literature on this topic to understand better how I can support them.

The results of this research are not good for the non-native speakers among us, especially those with strong foreign accents.

Continue reading →

Law Students and Stress

Citation:
Lara Dresser (2005) Promoting Psychological Health in Law Students, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 24:1-2, 41-72, DOI: 10.1300/J113v24n01_02

Since I am currently working on an article that discusses law school culture, albeit one that focuses on acculturation issues faced by foreign law students, I thought this would be as good an article as any to start this project with.

Continue reading →