Congratulations to Natalie Adamyk, winner of the Best Student Paper award from the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA)! This award is given to the graduate student whose paper, presented at the Annual CSA Conference, is judged to be the best among those received for adjudication. Natalie's paper is titled, “ 'You can transfer skills you’ve gained over time:' Contingent Academics’ Use of Emotional Capital as Skilled Emotion Management."
Natalie Adamyk is a third-year PhD student in Sociology with research interests in gender and labour, particularly in the areas of contingent employment and emotion management. She completed this paper with the help of a 2020 Summer Fellowship, and has submitted the paper to the Canadian Review of Sociology.
We have included an abstract of her paper below.
Abstract
This research extends recent scholarship on emotion management among contingent academics, currently academia’s fastest-growing sector, by focusing on how women in these temporary jobs undertake emotion management by gaining and diffusing personal stocks of emotional capital. Results from 40 semi-structured interviews with contingent academics in universities across Canada demonstrate that they acquire emotional capital, or stocks of emotion-based feeling and knowledge, both within and outside of the university, and knowingly deploy them within their jobs as instructors, mentors and colleagues. Notably, these workers are able to reclaim respect, authority, and cope with the effects of job precarity through sophisticated application of emotional capital. These experiences are not monolithic, however, as women in academia often encounter gendered and racialized vectors of marginalization and difference. These differences result in women having to acquire and deploy different forms of emotional capital more acutely in certain social situations. Findings ultimately suggest that women in contingent academia have varying degrees of emotional agency, but, as emotional capital theorists note, are also confined by systemic forms of stratification within the university.