Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

"I feel like I'm changing people's lives, even if it's just two hours at a time": Understanding contingent instructors' emotion management in university teaching

This article extends existing scholarship on contingent or temporary-contract university instructors' emotional agency by employing the Bolton's emotion management and Cottingham's emotional capital typologies in tandem. In interviews with 40 instructors from universities across Canada, participants described acquiring both primary and secondary emotional capital as an embodied psychosocial resource through past education, upbringing and culture, and knowledge and skills from previous work and training experiences respectively. They then deployed this capital through emotion management based in both social and organizational feeling rules in their capacity as professors. This allowed instructors to reinforce their own sense of purpose, authority and competence as instructors, and to establish fulfilling relationships with students through teaching and mentoring which they infused with personal meaning. However, instructors' agency was also curtailed to varying degrees, by both institutional attitudes around academic contingency and sexist, and in some cases, racist or otherwise patronizing attitudes from students. Despite this, instructors were often able to reaffirm their identities as instructors by using emotion management in self-affirming ways, such as by drawing on self-confidence gained through previous occupations and training, and facilitating cultural backgrounds shared with students through emotional management.

"The people here knew how I used to live, but now I have to start again:" Lived experiences and expectations of the displaced and non-displaced women affected by the Thwake Multipurpose Dam construction in Makueni County, Kenya

BACKGROUND

Dam construction and associated disruptive activities such as population displacement can have significant societal consequences, especially for those socially and economically disadvantaged. Though community-level health and social consequences of displacements have been documented, there is little understanding of the individual-level consequences and intra-household gendered dynamics.

OBJECTIVE/METHODS

We sought to explore the experiences and expectations of displaced (n = 30) and non-displaced (n = 20) women in Makueni County, Kenya, where Kenya's second largest dam, Thwake Multipurpose Dam, is being constructed. We used qualitative techniques, including photo-elicitation interviews, go-along interviews, key informant interviews, and participant observation, to understand the lived experiences of women affected by the dam construction processes and their associated disruptions.

RESULTS

We found that both displaced and non-displaced women experienced the impacts of dam construction in four areas, i.e., economic (income loss), health (hearing damage), social (disrupted social networks), and environmental (flooding) domains. Though both groups described adverse effects, the displaced women perceived worse economic and social outcomes than non-displaced ones. Further, older and married women in both groups had the worst lived experiences and negative perceptions about the consequences for social well-being, e.g., loss of cultural identity, land ownership, and access to important religious sites. Changes in livelihood also transformed gender roles as women assumed economic responsibilities to cushion their families from hunger.

CONCLUSION

Development projects such as dams negatively impact the host community-displaced and the non-displaced experience adverse health, social, and environmental effects. However, poor women who are smallholder farmers bear the greatest burden. Assessment of individual-level experiences and intrahousehold dynamics might enhance our understanding of the biosocial outcomes of these consequences. Therefore, integrative biosocial approaches should be considered when examining the impacts of dam construction.