Unaccounted Intersectional Emotional Labor: Grieving While Managing Faculty Socio-Professional Relationships

After the death of a loved one (bereavement), faculty can experience a wide range of unexpected, embodied responses (grief), which can be physiological, mental, and emotional. Grief may influence Faculty Socio-Professional (FSP) relationships, which are central, not tangential, to daily faculty work. We offer an “intersectional emotional labor” theoretical framework to define and discuss FSP relationships among grieving tenure-earning Black women faculty, a historically marginalized population in academia, as they initiate and maintain FSP relationships during their probationary years. In doing so, we advance an interdisciplinary grief conversation in multicultural education. We end by offering suggestions to support grieving tenure-earning Black women faculty.