Who should carry the load? Reflections on emotional labour and disability in higher education

There is a question I have been sitting with since I gave a presentation on emotional labour at a symposium a few months ago. Actually, there are three. I did not have time to answer them at the event, and I am probably not going to answer them here either. But I think they are worth spending some time with.

For those who missed the presentation: emotional labour (commonly attributed initially to Hochschild) is the hidden work of managing your own feelings and other people’s feelings, particularly in professional and study contexts. Research tells us that disabled people carry a disproportionate share of it, and our community’s experiences in higher education certainly mirror this.

When a disabled student carefully manages the feelings of the administrator processing their access request, that is cognitive and emotional work that their non-disabled peers simply do not have to do. When we spend an hour crafting a response to an apologetic email from a staff member who did not fix the problem we raised, that is an hour we did not spend on research.

For many disabled people, it is this emotional labour that presents one of the core barriers to professional progression and success, despite being generally ignored by workplace diversity and inclusion efforts.

The questions I want to reflect on are these: if this emotional labour is labour, should it, and can it, be compensated? Can it be reduced, and if so, whose job is that? And what are we losing out on while all this energy goes elsewhere?

These questions have sat with me since learning of the passing of the inimitable Dr Ellen Fraser-Barbour. It was Ellen’s work and prior comments on emotional labour which motivated the choice of the symposium’s topic. Doing justice to the contributions Ellen has made to disability research, advocacy, higher education, and society generally is a huge ask and not one I can answer alone. Writing this follow-up article therefore felt insurmountable for a while, and I didn’t know when the timing would be right. Please read about Ellen’s ongoing impact, explore her published work, and learn about the influence she had on people across the community.

In the meantime, here’s my attempt at picking up the baton to move this conversation forward.

This is the question I feel most uncertain about, which is probably why it keeps coming back.

Why does compensation for emotional labour feel complicated? Partly because quantifying it is pretty difficult. Partly because naming it as labour requires institutions to admit they have been extracting it for free. And partly, I think, because there is a version of this conversation that ends up placing the burden back on disabled people. Requiring us to document and justify and account for every instance of invisible work to receive recognition for it. Which would itself be more emotional labour!

The mental health and disability research communities are resolute on the importance of compensating lived experience contributions. But how does this play out when the involvement of lived experience is less explicit, and is a function of workplace cultures that implicitly demand disabled people to perform for them?

We have some precedents worth examining. Some universities provide payments to First Nations academic staff to acknowledge the cultural load they carry — the committee work, the community consultation, the burden of being the person in the room who is expected to represent an entire community’s experience while also doing their actual job. Others pay specifically for the contributions made by staff using First Nations languages in their work or contributing to cultural activities outside of working hours. The logic is straightforward: if an institution benefits from labour, it should pay for it.

However, it’s still clear in this case that the Cultural Workload Allowance is for more formally recognised and structured contributions, rather than the informal and everyday emotional labour that First Nations staff perform. Staff are remunerated for cultural load carried in service of the institution. This is not a payment for the emotional labour staff undertake in response to the colonial structures and racist attitudes that try to marginalise them and their success.

This demonstrates the nuance that I’m struggling to grapple with, around the difference between lived experience and emotional labour. For those of us practiced in lived experience leadership, we can sometimes extract the emotional labour component out of this work to an extent. But there is still this less explicit, more invisible, incidental emotional labour that I think institutions are much less likely to see as real, let alone worthy of compensation. It feels more akin to managing microaggressions than explicit representative work.

For the committees where I am often the only student in a meeting room full of staff, I am rarely compensated despite being charged with representing all disabled students (especially when appointed student representatives fail to attend). This is unfortunately still a structural feature of how institutions currently operate. But again, this is more of an issue of lived experience compensation. I think these days it would be hard to find someone who could genuinely argue that it’s fair that a student from a marginalised community should have to sit in a room of well-paid public servants, academics, and professional staff for free.

Anecdotally, I think that the emotional labour requirement in spaces where lived experience isn’t being compensated is higher. When an institution is relying on free lived experience insights with the justification that it will make things better for our communities in future, the emotional labour inherent in either sucking it up, fighting for better, or justifying our decisions not to engage (both to ourselves and others) is huge.

I clearly do not have a neat answer here. But I think it’s worth thinking about the differences between lived experience leadership (official or unofficial), and emotional labour.

This question seems much more obvious. The requirement for marginalised communities to perform this labour is inherently unjust and there is a clear imperative to eliminate it.

Though, it’s worth thinking about this carefully. There are two different ways of answering this question and they lead to very different places.

One answer places the responsibility on disabled people. Set better limits. Say no to requests that cross into unpaid labour. Protect your energy. Don’t devalue your work, don’t mask, don’t fawn, don’t perform. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

Arguably there is something to this — I have written before about the trap of becoming pathetically grateful just for being allowed into the rooms where it all happens, only to become tokenised or otherwise exploited.

But to me, this lets institutions and so-called allies off the hook entirely. It asks disabled people to solve, individually, a problem that is collective and structural. It also assumes a level of security and power that many disabled people, particularly students and early career researchers, simply do not have. The person who can afford to say no is not the person who is most exposed to this labour in the first place.

The better response to this question asks what non-disabled colleagues, managers, and institutions would need to change about how they operate. Not asking disabled people to solve problems that belong to paid staff. Not requiring visible, performed commitment before we are respected and believed. Responding to a raised concern by addressing it, rather than generating a new round of relationship management work for the person who raised it.

These are basic behavioural and interpersonal features of a workplace that does not extract unpaid labour from the people it is supposed to be supporting. They are also far more impactful practices than standard diversity and inclusion training programs or afternoon teas. They are commitments that demonstrate allyship beyond pins and email signature blocks.

This is the question I find hardest to confront. Thinking about what we have lost as a result of the time and energy spent on this kind of labour can become very depressing, very quickly.

I am wary of framing this in purely productive terms — the idea that disabled people would produce more outputs, more publications, more contributions, if only we had more energy. That framing treats our value as contingent on what we can generate, and I spend a lot of time arguing that the business case for diversity is harmful and counterproductive. Though, it is worth considering this angle, because this is exactly how our institutions measure and quantify our worthiness of promotion and recognition. Mourning our losses here is valid.

But it’s not all about output. It is about what kinds of thinking, connection, and engagement are possible when our energy is not constantly being redirected or depleted unnecessarily. If we weren’t spending Sunday evening rewording an email so it does not read as too direct, rehearsing how to decline an offer of unwanted help without seeming ungrateful, or managing the feelings of the institutions that are supposed to be managing ours, what would we be doing instead? More publications and outputs, maybe. But also, having the time, energy, and space to connect with our communities, strengthen our movement, and solidify our position as valuable and worthy members of the scholarly community.

The critical perspective would suggest that institutions perpetuate the systems which require us to perform this labour intentionally. It keeps us smaller, more tired, more compliant, less feisty. The drain is intentional and is itself disabling. It allows non-disabled and less marginalised folk to maintain their power and influence.

As I said at the symposium: very rarely do we perform labour when it is not benefiting someone. It is certainly not benefiting us.

The hopeful perspective points to an opportunity to unlock the energy and potential of a community which is already punching way above its weight relative to opportunity. Alleviating the effects of this emotional labour frees up our energy to organise, build coalitions, and perhaps even build our own structures to develop and share knowledge. Then, we wouldn’t have to rely on the credibility of institutions that were built to exclude us in the first place. Burn it down, start fresh.

I generally try not to end articles with a call to raze it all to the ground, but this feels warranted. I’m not going to do the emotional labour of softening a call to action to make this more palatable to those whose power would be under threat. Confronting their complicity in disempowerment is their job, not mine.

More on emotional labour:

• From Deficit to Dignity? Young People with Disabilities Negotiating Ableism, Emotional Labour and Resistance (Couch et al., 2026)

• Disabled and academic: A collaborative autoethnography on ableism and cruel optimism within Australian higher education (Cook et al., 2026)

• Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure (Hochschild, 1979)

• Disability and the impact of emotional labour (Lamanna & Scully, 2026)

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