Subtle acts of care: emotion and materiality among repairers in Santiago, Chile

This article explores strategies for engaging geographically fragmented urban communities as active participants in conceptually re-mapping their former localities. It looks in detail at the ongoing Retracing Salford project in Salford, UK, which employs the use of everyday objects and oral histories to engage and enable former residents to reconnect with their recently demolished neighbourhoods and each other. The project also seeks to document an urban working class history largely overlooked by the large-scale institutions. 
 
 The project is based on a PhD study undertaken by the author at The District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, which examined the use of material artefacts in exhibitions and memory workshops at that museum (Cassidy 2009). Like District Six, Salford has undergone wide-scale demolition and population dispersal over the past 40 years. 
 
 What began as relatively simple installations in museums, libraries and the like, has now grown to include digitised versions of the family snaps, street signs and oral histories, as a developing online Streets Museum archive (www.streetsmuseum.co.uk). This article reflects on how the methodology employed in the Retracing Salford project has helped rejuvenate and reconnect these dispersed communities. The article argues that the approach used is succeeding in widening the circle of participation and debate in relation to heritage issues, in particular the absence of commemoration of working-class community culture in the city. It has also increased awareness of urban land clearance issues. Its continued success depends on numerous factors, such as developing new strategies of engagement with the community, regularly gaining publicity and organising new exhibitions and workshops.
 
 Keywords: Material culture, community participation, urban working class history

This chapter examines the possibility of reading contemporary Polish poetry in the context of Jewish material culture studies. Specifically, it deals with poems that reflect on the function of “Post-Jewish” objects and sites in contemporary Polish culture. All of the poems analyzed in this chapter also confirm that in contrast to art or architecture, literature deals with material culture in a distinctive way: since it cannot present it in a three-dimensional way, it relies on mediated materiality, shown through poetic tropes and accessible by means of imagination. The subject of the first part is the contemporary debate around Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poem [Non omnis moriar], one of the first texts to raise the issue of Poles denouncing Jews to Germans during the war and seizing their property. In the 21st century, the researchers’ focus is no longer only on the content of the poem and its meanings, but also on its status: legal and material. In the second part, the author analysis how the “Post-Jewish things”: the remnants of matzevot and cemeteries, destroyed synagogues, and illegally taken objects of everyday use are treated in the polish contemporary poetry (especially by Piotr Mitzner and Dariusz Pado) in the context of postcatastrophe and remembrance.

“Leave me out of it and raise my salary”: Invisible work in the labor market and the gender wage gap

Public administration courses often use the pillars of public administration (e.g., efficiency, effectiveness, equity, economy, accountability, responsiveness) as foundational concepts across our core curriculum. However, our public administration curriculum is alarmingly absent of conversations about emotional labor. Put simply, emotional labor is emotion management and life management combined, which is unpaid, invisible work we do to keep those around us happy (Rinfret et al., 2022). In this paper we detail a semester-long research project focused on emotional labor, and why it is necessary for how we work in a diverse and changing workforce. Our pilot study examines original data collected during the spring and summer 2022 to document the experiences of 36 students enrolled in a core public administration course. The findings illustrate that using the emotional labor project (ELP) provides opportunities for us to engage in conversation with our students to change the narrative in our discipline and practice.

Books reviewed in this article: Madeleine Leonard, Invisible Work, Invisible Workers: The Informal Economy in Europe and the US Jacqueline O’Reilly and Colette Fagan (eds), Part-Time Prospects: An International Comparison of Part-Time Work in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim

Freelance creative work is a labour of love where opportunities for self-expression are combined with exploitative working conditions. This article explores this dynamic by showing how a group of freelance creative labourers navigate employment while coping with the pressures associated with economic precarity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we argue that full-time stand-up comedians engage in ‘pecuniary’ forms of emotion management in an occupational field where social networks and professional relationships play a prominent role. First, comedians project an image of positivity to demonstrate a willingness to work for little or no pay in order to curry favour with comedy club promoters. Second, comedians suppress feelings of anxiety and frustration that arise from financial insecurity in order to keep their relationships with promoters on an even keel – even when the rate of pay and promptness of remuneration fall below acceptable standards. Our study thus has implications for other creative sectors in which precarity is the norm, since it suggests that emotional labour is a resource not only for engaging with customers and clients but also for engaging with multiple employers, negotiating pay and dealing with conditions of insecurity in freelance settings – often with unintended, paradoxical, results.

Efforts to improve mental health treatment delivery come at a time of rising inequality and cuts or insufficient increases to mental health funding. Public mental health clinicians face increased demands, experience economic stress, and treat underresourced patients disproportionately burdened by trauma. The authors sought to understand clinicians' current economic and psychological conditions and the relationship of these conditions to the delivery of an evidence-based intervention (EBI) designed to treat posttraumatic stress disorder among youths. In July 2020, 49 public mental health clinicians from 16 Philadelphia clinics who were trained in an EBI, trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), were surveyed by e-mail. Respondents reported on their economic precarity, financial strain, burnout, secondary traumatic stress (i.e., the stress response associated with caring for people exposed to trauma), and TF-CBT use. Associations between clinicians' job-related stressors and their use of TF-CBT were examined with mixed models. Content coding was used to organize clinicians' open-ended responses to questions regarding financial strain related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians' economic precarity, financial strain, and job-related stress were high; 37% of clinicians were independent contractors, 44% of whom wanted a salaried position. Of 37 clinicians with education debt, 38% reported owing ≥$100,000. In the past year, 29% of clinicians reported lack of personal mental health care because of cost, and 22% met the cutoff for experiencing secondary traumatic stress symptoms. Education debt was negatively associated with use of TF-CBT (p<0.001). The stress of providing care in underresourced clinical settings may interfere with efforts to integrate scientific evidence into mental health care.

Introduction - Estimates and Guesstimates: Defining the Informal Economy in Europe and the United State - Continuities and Discontinuities in Work and Employment - Informal Employment in Europe and the United States - Household Economic Strategies: Work Beyond Employment - Women and the Informal Economy - Alienation Versus Liberation: The Impact of the Informal Economy - Conclusions - References - Index

Our aim is to examine a series of systems-level challenges to the continuity of care of a newborn (i.e. a particular case) in the rural–urban context. These challenges include the state-wide system whereby inadequate bed numbers relative to demand are monitored on a daily basis (bed management), specialist medical expertise as a resource, and the flow of information between hospitals in a rural–urban divide. Whether quality of care is maintained in light of these challenges is dependent on the relationships and ‘invisible’ work of a number of clinicians. Of critical importance are issues involving affective or invisible work and the solidary networks and relationships of clinicians. Ethnographic participant-observations were made of clinical teams and their networks in an Australian rural–urban health care service involving the multiple hospital admissions of a seriously-ill infant. The findings demonstrate that the system works because of clinicians’ willingness to enact their practice knowledge, the networking they undertake, their resilience and the affective labour they perform to attend to patients’ and families’ needs. Ultimately the continuity of care is embedded in the quality of relationships as much as in specialist knowledge or professional expertise.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.

This article discusses the possibility of improved conceptualization and operationalization of cognitive, mental, and/or emotional labour as a form of housework. Since it falls into the domain of so-called invisible work, which implies the performance of several tasks at the same time, fragmentation of time and scattered activities, the research so far has largely neglected to survey this type of work, thus leaving unrecorded the real amount of work that mostly women perform in unpaid and invisible work in the family and household. To put an end to such neglect, this article proposes the introduction of the concept of cognitive and emotional household management (KEUK) and defines the dimensions for its operationalization: management of resources and time (cognitive work) and management of relationships and emotions (emotional work). These dimensions are studied through interpersonal relationships within the household, then with the relatives and with the wider community, and finally in relation to other institutions. The intensity of these activities is also operationalized, considering whether they are performed daily or occasionally. The article also lists 14 items with which these dimensions were investigated in a survey questionnaire. The authors of the article believe that with this kind of conceptualization and operationalization, they have contributed to a clearer definition and application of this concept in the broader research of housework, the relation of work and family obligations, and the study of gender relations and roles.

The implementation of intern program is very important and beneficial for the hospitality industry. However, hotels often ask hospitality interns to engage in high levels of emotional labor but they often receive lower compensation than formal employees, which might influence interns' motivation for service performance. In the present study, we recruited 244 hospitality intern students from 34 hotels to examine the relationship between interns' emotional labor and service performance and explore whether hotels can use intern training and mentoring programs to enhance the effectiveness of intern students' emotional labor. Our data was collected from multiple time phases (at the start and end of the internship) and multiple sources (self and supervisor ratings). We found that interns' deep acting was positively related to service performance. Additionally, we found that intern training and mentoring programs act as moderators on the intern emotional labor and service performance relationship. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

Interviews conducted with 25 community-based AIDS caregivers highlight the gender-based stigma directed at black men involved in community-based AIDS care. Male caregivers are labelled as lazy, unintelligent, homosexual or too feminised to be ‘real’ men. As the eight men in this sample indicate, none of them embarked upon AIDS care by choice, since most were forced into it by poverty and poor scholastic performance. Male and female caregivers alike perpetuated societal gender binary views by dubbing care work as feminised. In spite of the fact that all men and women carers reported emotional labour techniques, carried out in the course of their care work. women were defined as naturally emotionally fit to perform care. The continued search for an idealised masculinity coloured most of the coping strategies adopted by the gender-stigmatised men. In most cases, they sought to leave the AIDS care domain and obtain stereotypically masculine jobs in the professional sector. In constantly seeking this idealised masculinity, the much needed presence of these men in community-based AIDS care is prohibited, as it perpetuates the myth that certain types of work are gender specific. The most promising finding was obtained from a male caregiver who defined himself as a ‘worker’, albeit in the informal sector. He also sought to remain in the world of community-based NOS care for the foreseeable future. This man was masculine on his own terms and he defined his emotional labour as ‘work’. Thus, he defined himself as masculine, whilst simultaneously defining himself as a worker. His self valuation was possible as he placed a gender-neutral recognition upon his chosen form of work. Such identification is crucial, as these caregivers work in trying circumstances, and bear emotional, social and financial costs with little or no benefits and legal protection. As the majority of men saw this work as temporary, a worker identity was not claimed. As a result, little could happen by way of collective action to improve and regulate their conditions. By using emotional labour process theory as a lens, the experiences of black male care workers are better understood. More research of this nature needs to be carried out with a larger sample to verify these sorts of conclusions.

In many Global South societies, especially in Southeast Asia, women are increasingly burdened with dual responsibilities in the informal economy and domestic sphere. This phenomenon of dual roles often leads to role conflict, disproportionately affecting women’s well-being due to persistent gendered expectations and structural inequalities. This study aims to explore how women navigate these conflicts in contexts shaped by patriarchal norms and economic precarity. Using a qualitative phenomenological method, the research draws insights from in-depth interviews with three women workers in the informal sector in Jember, Indonesia, who also bear domestic responsibilities. The findings reveal that these women face significant role strain due to the unequal division of labor at home, although some receive minimal support from their spouses. Despite these challenges, women continue to strive for balance between productive and reproductive labor. Framed by feminist theory and situated within Global South epistemologies, this study highlights how gender inequality is reproduced through everyday practices. It also calls for more context-sensitive policies that recognize and support the invisible labor of women in informal sectors across the Global South.

Background:Adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) living with HIV in Ghana face multiple, intersecting forms of marginalization. Beyond the clinical management of HIV, little is known about how they construct meaning, navigate identity, and imagine their futures within structural contexts shaped by stigma, gender inequity, economic precarity and colonial legacies.Objective:To explore how AGYW living with HIV in Ghana understand and negotiate their social identities in work and school. We then aimed to understand how their lived experiences at school and work are shaped by broader systems of power.Methods:This qualitative study drew on semi-structured interviews with AGYW (ages 11–24, N = 24) receiving HIV care in Kumasi, Ghana. Data were coded both inductively and deductively. Themes were interpreted through the Ghanian context using intersectionality, Critical Disability Studies, spoiled identity theory and African Feminist decolonial theory. The analysis was conducted iteratively and reflexively, with attention to positionality, gender, and structural power dynamics.Results:Seven major themes were identified: (1) social support; (2) concrete plans for the future; (3) unattainability of the future; (4) coping via detachment; (5) need for privacy and confidentiality; (6) role as arbiter of HIV information; and (7) financial stress. Across these themes, AGYW described dynamic processes of identity negotiation, moral and emotional labor, and structural constraint. HIV was rarely the sole barrier—rather, it intersected with gender norms, family dynamics, age hierarchies, economic marginalization, and misinformation to shape participants’ social worlds. Some participants coped through detachment or concealment, while others reclaimed agency through caregiving roles, education, or aspirational goals.Conclusions:AGYW living with HIV in Ghana are not only navigating a chronic illness but also resisting a layered matrix of social and structural injustice. Their stories reveal both vulnerability and strategic agency. Interventions and policy must go beyond biomedical care to address stigma, provide confidential and affirming school and work environments, and offer structural supports for emotional, educational, and economic well-being.