Affective Politics and the Burden of Emotion Labor: Refugee and Migrant Staff as Providers of Migrant Support

This Paper explores the role of affect as an expression of the experiential knowledge of refugee and migrant front-line in supporting other migrants, asylum seekers and refugees within the social sector in the UK, the Netherlands and Austria. I will pay particular attention to how their narrations of affect as sensations that are registered but not yet categorized as ‘emotions’ (Gould 2009), become political. I will then argue that this ‘affective knowledge’ imposes various burdens of emotion labor, including the work of affecting clients’ feelings, the management of self-feeling, and defining the meaning of one’s work (Mirchandani 2003). Taking up Kiran Mirchandani’s challenge to address the racial silences in studies on emotion work and gender, I will show that this emotion labor has to be understood against the background of a masculine white-normed professionalization discourse, which makes such affective role precarious. Finally, I argue that this emotion labor has political implications in that it neutralizes the excess of suffering produced by migration regimes; by making NGO clients ‘feel better’ (Larruina & Ghorashi forthcoming), by staff’s self-disciplining of their own feelings and by defining the work as meaningful in the face of deteriorating political conditions for asylum seekers and refugees.