The Environment and Society Speakeasy series is pleased to host visiting geographers Peter Adey and Weiqiang Lin presenting:
‘Affecting Emotional Labour: Automation, Masculinities and Airport Workers in Singapore’.
Emotional labour has grown increasingly pertinent in the twenty-first century, as the service economy expands and displaces traditional sectors such as manufacturing. This trend is bound to become more acute as the economy further evolves after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the proliferation of advanced automation. Set against the backdrop of such recent technological change, this paper critiques present depictions of emotional labour in geography and cognate fields as describing either an exploitation of ‘feelings’ enacted on (mostly) women, or one celebrating masculine invulnerability and career-mindedness. Using interviews with 38 male airport workers, it explores the potentiality of another kind of emotional (or affective) labour, where people, including men, affected by technology’s encroachment choose to engage in a work of making their bodies, dispositions and feelings matter more.
We articulate this idea through three affective registers—expressed as sociability, tactility and responsibility—that the airport workers display in the workplace, as they respond to the pressures of increased automation. The paper offers a departure from the preponderance of emotional labour scholarship that tends to concentrate on feminized emotional management working with and against exploitative transformations of the workplace, to argue, instead, that in the often hidden and poorly understood spaces of the airport emotional labour can also be used in malleable ways to hedge against a time of precarity.
This is a hybrid event, please register now for more information.
Weiqiang Lin is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Trained as a socio-cultural geographer, his research interests revolve around issues of mobilities and the infrastructures of moving. He has over ten years of experience researching on contemporary mobility issues, including in migration and transport. Weiqiang sits on the editorial boards of Dialogues in Human Geography, Digital Geography & Society, Journal of Transport Geography, Mobilities, and Mobility Humanities (also Advisory Board), and is a Section Editor for Transfers (Ideas in Motion).
Peter Adey is Professor of Human Geography and Head of Human Geography, Anthropology and Development Studies at Monash University. Peter works on the cultures, aesthetics and security of mobility, is a co-editor of the journal Mobilities, and is the author of books such as Mobility (Routledge); Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects (Wiley); and Evacuation: the politics and aesthetics of movement in emergency (Duke UP).
