Emotional geographies and work

This chapter explores the emotional geographies of work through the different binaries underpinning how work shapes scales and spatialities. We explore how emotions blur and smudge the boundaries between care and wage work, femininities and masculinities, and the public/private nexus. We examine how these relations yield complex emotional geographies that bridge many spaces and places – from the home, to offices and shops, to institutions and remote working forms. Drawing on examples from women in academia, (migrant) precarious labour, and formal/informal forms of home labour, we argue for the necessity of centring emotions as part of the jagged edges of care-wage and work-home communities. We show how emotions are used as forms of control, as well as how they offer avenues for resistance. We conclude by exploring future directions for the emotional geographies of work, calling for more attention to the collective experience, building on connectivity between places and how emotions facilitate flows between different spatialities, as well as calling for further exploration of the use of emotions in dominant power structures.