School of Social and Political Science

Description

Seminar with Olivia S. Mendoza (Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance University of Canberra)

Organised by CRITIQUE and the Gender Politics Research Group

Host: Annika Bergman Rosamond

Discussants: Alyssa Martin and Oliver Escobar

Abstract: Emotions figured in the discourse on deliberation to make deliberative theory more democratic. However, recent studies show that emotions reproduce rather than eliminate inequalities: emotion work required in deliberations privilege individuals with greater emotional capital. As a response to this question on the role of emotions in deliberation, I foreground emotional labour in deliberative democracy by bringing into conversation emotional labour scholarship with deliberative democracy research. Coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983, emotional labour refers to the act of “induce[ing] or suppress[ing] feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” It refers to the management of emotions in paid work. In the context of a deliberative space, this is performed when taking a deliberative stance: maintaining empathy, open-mindedness, and readiness to preference and opinion change, while recognizing others as equals in the mutual exchange of reasons. In Part I, I describe the ambivalent democratic function of emotions, as recognized by deliberative and feminist democratic scholars. In Part II, I show how feminist discourses on emotional labour can enrich our understanding of emotions’ role in pursuing or thwarting democratic deliberation. In Part III, I reformulate emotional labour for deliberative democratic aims. I situate Shiloh Whitney’s intersectional feminist analysis of emotional labour in Michaele Ferguson’s call to attend to how particular social positions become the site of structural advantage or disadvantage. Deliberative democracy’s critical analysis of the political economy of deliberation provides practical ways to investigate emotional labour’s unique modes of exploitation, susceptibility to misuse and abuse, and the potential to name affective harms once we recognize that emotional labour is more than just paid work.

Short bio:

Olivia Mendoza is a Filipina PhD candidate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia, where she is recipient of the Deliberative Democracy PhD Scholarship Award (2023-2027). Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UP Baguio, for which she received the One UP Faculty Grant Award in Philosophy (Ethics) for Outstanding Teaching and Public Service. She researches emotions, deliberative theory, and feminist theory. Her works are published in Routledge, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Social Science Teaching, Research and Practice.