Caring in the classroom: the hidden toll of emotional labor of abolitionist scholar-activism

Abstract

Abolitionist-academics who bring abolition into the classroom are teaching to transgress quite literally in the service of and hope for freedom. This article relies upon thirty in-depth, international interviews with academics teaching in universities and prisons. The research questions emotional labor’s hidden toll on abolitionist scholars and finds that within the interdisciplinary field of critical criminology, participants commonly experienced working through hope, love, loneliness, fear and anxiety. While this research supports earlier understandings of the impact of expectations of caretaking on marginalized scholars, I also find that those who experience personal histories of criminalization may be especially vulnerable to burnout and pushout.