Identity Alignment and the Sociotechnical Reconfigurations of Emotional Labor in Transnational Gig-education Platforms

Teaching has often been characterized as a “labor of love.” Despite their passion, teachers often find themselves underpaid and unrecognized, leading them to engage in taxing emotional labor. Emotional labor in traditional educational settings is not new. However, teaching as online gig work has become increasingly data-driven and transnational. With the burgeoning popularity of online educational industries in China, U.S. teachers are entering the transitional gig economy to teach students, parents, and educational standards in cross-cultural contexts. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews with U.S. teachers who worked on Chinese gig-education platforms, this paper documents their challenges and how such platforms reconfigure their emotional labor, enabling them to reaffirm their identities as teachers and caregivers and rekindle the passion that gave their lives purpose and meaning. However, these platforms, underpinned by Chinese cultural values and data-driven technologies (e.g., datafication, algorithms, and surveillance) — which we dub transnational emotional computing — demand emergent forms of emotional labor with which participants must contend. This work contributes to a human-centered conceptualization of identity alignment and carries theoretical and design implications for the future of transnational gig platforms, especially for cross-cultural digital knowledge labor.