Dear Colleagues,
If you were interested in the thread that Chris
Heape launched on transformation learning or
the CLTAD conference presentation by Noam
Austerlits on emotions in the studio, you may
be interested this free seminar at Brunel.
They are also forming a research project for
which they seek participants.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
ESRC Seminar Series on Emotional Learning
- Reparative Forms of Emotional Learning -
Brunel University, Friday June 20th. 2003
The Newton Room
We invite you to the third in a series of sponsored seminars in
Emotion and Learning. This builds on earlier conferences, dialogues
with practitioners, workshops and on two special editions of a
journal on emotional labour (Soundings 11, 1999 & 20, 2002).
The seminar will investigate damaging and reparative forms of
emotional learning and emotion work and the usefulness of theories
and concepts from many disciplines and areas of practice. Presenters
are encouraged to use a range of approaches to presentation,
including workshops, poster displays and performance pieces, as well
as formal papers and polemical addresses.
We seek to advance the skilfulness of individuals and organisations,
in order to sustain and to enhance the performance emotion work in
their primary tasks.
On the day we will bring together practitioners, managers and
researchers from diverse disciplines including nursing and health
care, counselling, social work, education, biology, sociology,
management studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. We will be joined
by representatives of uniformed and non-uniformed emotional in public
and private sectors.
Places are free and funding is available to cover your travel,
subsistence and, if necessary, accommodation. However numbers are
limited and they are available on a first-come-first-served-basis.
Please e-mail Joanna Barry to reserve your place:
[log in to unmask]
The programme is subject to alteration as there may be something that
you might especially like to add to it:
9.00am-9.20am
Reception and Coffee
9.20am Session One
Introduction and Welcome
Steve Smith
Brunel University, School of Business and Management
Learning about the Self: Exploring Emotion and Identity through
Cognitive Sculpting
David Sims, Cass Business School
Liberation, Suppression and Upsetting Emotions: Martha Nussbaum's
Upheavals of Thought
Nelarine Cornelius, Brunel University, School of Business and Management
11.00am-11.30am
Coffee
Performance piece
11.30am-1.00pm
Session Two (Parallel Sessions)
2a
Illegitimate Emotion Work: Identifying and Preventing Bullying
Ruth Simpson Brunel University, School of Business and Management
Helen Clarke, University of Surrey, European Institute of Health and
Medical Sciences
Life after "Leadership Development": Practice Transformation through
Intelligent Emotions and the Containment of Anxiety
Geraldine Cunningham, Director of the Clinical Leadership Development
Programme, RCN Institute
2b
Affective Awareness of Affective Neutrality? Contradictory feeling
rules in midwives emotion work
Billie Hunter, Swansea University
Learning from Critical Emotional Incidents, a Workshop
Karen Blakeley, Brunel University, School of Business and Managent
1.00pm-2.30pm
Lunch
Launch of the Centre for Research in Emotion Work (CREW) We will be
inviting delegates to join an exciting programme of research and
practice development in Emotion Work. Emotion work can be thought of
as 'Front Line Service', but if you are unsure about what Emotion
Work involves, please take a look at the definitions offered at the
end of this flyer.
BEC/ PARC/ Royal College of Nursing/ Kent Constabulary/ Brunel School
of Business and Management/ Surrey University/ UEL
Confessional Environments
Poster Display
Emotion Work
Video Display
2.30pm-4.00pm
Session Three
Performance Workshop
Facilitated by Meretta Elliot, Brunel University, Department of Performing Arts
4.00pm-4.15pm
Tea
Performance piece
4.15pm-5.30pm
Session Four
Humility
Kay de Vires, University of Surrey, European Institute of Health and
Medical Sciences
Empathy
Theresa Wiseman, University of Surrey, European Institute of Health
and Medical Sciences
5.30pm-6.15pm
Plenary
Emotion, Work and Learning: the Emotional Work of Learning and
Transformation
Meretta Elliott, Pam Smith, Steve Smith, Nelarine Cornelius, David
Sims, Del Loewenthal
6.15pm- Reception
What is Emotion Work and Emotional Labour?
Emotion work is work whose object is the transformation of the
feelings of others, be they clients, guests, customers, patients,
suspects, voters, children, friends, partners, parents, enemies,
audience members or indeed the feelings of any other human being.
Emotional labour is all emotion work that involves payment to the
worker. Emotional labour is a 'sub-set' of emotion work. (By
definition, voluntary care, working for the Samaritans as a suicide
counsellor, parenting, being a member of an Alcoholics Anonymous
support group and domestic arguments represent emotion work, but not
emotional labour.)
Emotional labour subdivides into emotional labour for profit actors
and comedians in commercial theatre and television, flight
attendants, debt collectors, barristers, driving instructors, private
nursing, pressure selling, funeral directors and so on . and paid,
but not-for-profit emotional labour such prison work, NHS nursing,
policing, peacekeeping, suicide counselling, pastoral care and
political oratory.
It is estimated that emotional labour is part of the primary task of
one third of the workforce (Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart; the
commercialisation of human feeling), while everybody does emotion
work.
Yet there is very little discussion of it in the sociology of work
and organisations - perhaps because feelings are treated as linked to
the heart-soul, and therefore splendid, mystical, non-material and
immeasurable. That is emotional labour is somehow veiled, or exists
in a kind of unseen, fish-in-water type of way.
If it is done badly, the effectiveness of an organisation may be
undermined. If it is done particularly, life-threatening
circumstances may be brought about. Done well it can be heroic and of
extreme ethical and monetary value.
Dimension of Emotion Work
There are many dimensions to emotion work. It may be:
- deep-acted or surface acted (heart felt or painted-on)
- sacred or secular/ profane (evangelism, door-step security, sales,
confidence-tricks, spying)
- hospitable or hostile (diplomacy, seduction, intimidation)
- consenting or coercive (romance, extortion)
- legal or illegal (nursing, prostitution)
- fleeting or extended (checkout work, parenting)
- exalted or down-trodden (red-carpet celebrity walk, street-begging)
- empowered or dis-empowered (custody sergeant, war-briefing by
General Staff, railway customer complaints desk receptionist)
It may involve working that is
- one-to-one (counselling)
- one-to-many (stand-up comedy, sermons)
- many-to-one (bullying, cross-examination)
- many-to-many (stage-plays, riot, war)
- many-to-few (persecution, ethnic-cleansing, holocaust).
What emotional labourers have in common is that they work on some
kind of front line in face-to-face and/or voice-to-voice and
sometimes in body-to-body contact (call centres, nursing care,
dentistry, torture-confession).
Emotion work covers the most worthy and the most debased of human
activities. Sometimes these opposing evaluations are applied to the
same activity, according to whose side you are on, or on whether it
is being done under state authority or by private individuals
(authorised detention without trial, kidnapping).
Rationale
We are convinced that it is fruitful to bring together practitioners
and academics from as many branches of emotional labour as possible.
We are delighted to involve performance artists and nurses in our
seminar, because they have developed to most advance vocabulary for
describing and analysing emotional labour (performance theory, care);
and to bring them into contact with managers and practitioners from
other sectors.
The theme for June 20th. is `reparative and restitutive emotional
learning'. I take this to mean learning that is healthful, healing,
sustaining and capacity-building. Although the ESRC seminar series is
not specifically about emotional labour (and embraces emotion and
learning more widely), the special relevance to emotional labourers
is fairly easy to see:
Given the emotional content of their repertoire (particularly their
emotional literacy and acuity to the emotions of others), then if
theirymous ability to do the work is to be enhanced, their teaching
and learning also requires 'emotional intelligence'. This does not
mean that upsets and upheavals should be avoided in training, as
changes to the emotive-self are bound to be unsettling. (This is what
the RCN has found in its Clinical Leadership Development Programme,
for example. Similarly `diversity training' will make no difference
unless it is `taken to heart'.)
This suggests that sweet and disturbing observations have a place -
either represented in a performance or in the feelings which the
performance may mean to provoke in the audience.
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