Anna Woodham and Tamsin Russell (Museums Association) shared findings from our pilot project at the Glam Cares Conference on 18th June. Thank you to everyone who took part in the pilot!
GLAM Cares is a UK-wide support network for people working with communities across the galleries, libraries, archives, museums and heritage sectors. Its regular conference provides a fantastic space for practitioners to come together, exchange ideas, reflect on shared challenges, and explore best practice.
At this year’s conference, we shared an overview of findings from our pilot baseline survey and diary study, conducted between August and September 2025. The presentation was enriched by reflections from a panel of practitioners and academics, Tom Hughes (Devil’s Porridge Museum), Nuala Morse (University of Leicester) and Emma King (Freelance/KCL), who generously offered their immediate responses to the findings. We also really appreciated input directly from conference attendees through a series of live Mentimeter polls.
After introducing the project’s theoretical framework, drawing on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concepts of feeling rules, surface acting and deep acting, we explored how emotional labour shapes everyday experiences in the GLAM sector. Our pilot findings suggest that workers draw on a wide spectrum of emotions in their roles. Notably, fatigue emerged as an emotion that was moderately prevalent but appeared to be less readily acknowledged or accepted within the sector. We also highlighted some intriguing gender differences that emerged from the data (while noting that this is just a pilot survey!).
Like any workplace, the GLAM sector is shaped by its own emotional expectations and dynamics. What particularly interests us is understanding what may be distinctive about emotional labour in these settings. This pilot study has provided a great foundation, helping us identify promising directions for a larger-scale project and revealing several emerging themes worthy of deeper investigation. Watch this space!
Many thanks to Dr Nora Berghoff for her assistance with the number-crunching and analysis of the data and to Professor Chia-huei Wu and Dr Ali Budjanovcanin for their valuable input to the development of the pilot.