The Work That Breaks Us: Affective Labour,Transformative Learning,and Institutional Complicity

Unearthing Fractures in Transformative Learning

What constitutes ‘transformative learning’ in higher education amid polarizing political discourses, environmental crises, and humanitarian atrocities unfolding in real time, from Gaza to Haiti to the ongoing erasure of Indigenous life? Institutions often proclaim commitment to justice while settler-colonial logics persist and Global South and Indigenous epistemologies are erased (Cook-Lynn, 2000; Grande, 2018). Grounded in my experience as an equity practitioner at a research-intensive Canadian university, this paper examines how affective labour, institutional contradictions, and organizational power shape both the practice and limits of transformative learning.

Affective labour is commonly defined as emotional, relational, service, and gendered work (Ahmed, 2004; Hardt, 1999; Hochschild, 2012; Michlová, 2025; Wharton, 2009). I extend this definition to the institutional and collective level, conceptualizing affective labour as the often invisible work that sustains equity commitments taken up by many staff and educators, whom I collectively refer to as equity practitioners. Building on scholarship on edge emotions and disorientation (Briciu, 2024; Mälkki & Green, 2018), this framing highlights how institutional cultures and power relations structure the emotional demands placed on those advancing equity-focused transformation.

Amid intensifying political pressures and ongoing global crises, equity practitioners face distinct emotional and ethical burdens. Understanding transformative learning therefore requires looking beyond curriculum or pedagogy to the collective labour of holding communities, navigating institutional contradictions, and translating grief into practice, while questioning the justice of positioning practitioners as primary agents of transformation when they are routinely denied authority, resources, and protections.

Practicing Equity Through Shared Commitments and Challenges

Equity practitioners enact commitments to human rights, equity, decolonization, and anti-oppression through collective and relational practices. Despite working across different units and mandates, these shared commitments bridge silos and sustain hope for institutional and pedagogical change. Equity practitioners carry both grief and cautious optimism into meetings, workshops, committees, and classrooms, continually negotiating who can speak, what can be named, and at what personal cost. Equity practitioners’ labour crosses boundaries – mentoring students, supporting colleagues, convening difficult conversations, and translating trauma-informed, culturally responsive knowledge into inclusive pedagogical practice.

Tensions Between Transformative Theory and Institutional Constraints

Many practitioners draw on Mezirow’s (1997) conception of transformative learning, which invites learners to broaden worldviews, deepen self-reflection, and integrate new experiences. Equity practitioners’ work is also rooted in critical pedagogy lineages (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), that emphasize dialogic, justice-oriented education (Johnson & Morris, 2010), as well as scholarship that foregrounds the ethical and relational dimensions of transformative practice in higher education (Fleming, 2018; Tilakaratna & Szenes, 2024). These frameworks foreground educators to cultivate spaces where power, privilege, and oppression can be interrogated. Yet efforts to open such spaces are often met with institutional silence, threats to academic freedom, and career precarity (Iheduru-Anderson, 2025). In practice, theory collides with institutional structures as the transformative potential of learning is constrained by inertia, strategic ambiguity, and everyday power dynamics, leaving practitioners suspended between ethical imperatives and systemic limitations.

External Pressures and Institutional Complicity

The challenges practitioners face are not only institutional but are intensified by broader political and social forces. Drawing on Giroux’s critique of neoliberal neutrality (2004; 2020), the academy’s claim to impartiality often functions as a silencing device, especially when financial and political pressures align with anti-DEI and anti-Critical Race Theory agendas. Conyers and Wright Fields (2025) show that, in the face of legislative backlash, many universities respond through silence, strategic ambiguity, or quiet accommodation, actions that ultimately reproduce the very ideologies they purport to resist. These external dynamics compound internal constraints, deepening the ethical and emotional burdens on equity practitioners whose commitments to justice are continually tested from multiple directions.

Fractured Transformation Amid Institutional Constraints and Emotional Burden

The concept of ‘institutional betrayal’, how institutions inadvertently harm those who depend on them (Freyd, 2013; Gómez, 2022; Smidt et al., 2023), helps explain how emotional and relational burdens accumulate in equity roles. Without implying intentional wrongdoing, it highlights how neglect, tokenism, and inadequate protections intensify practitioners’ affective labour and moral strain.

Ahmed (2012) describes institutional diversity commitments as ‘non-performative’ acts, rhetoric that absorbs dissent without producing structural change (p. 85). Practitioners are frequently tokenized on committees, nominally supported in pilot programs that never scale, or tasked with one-off workshops that mask the absence of real strategy, budget, or leadership. Equity practitioners are left ‘banging [their] heads on the brick wall’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 26), confronting barriers that remain immovable despite repeated effort. When anti-oppressive teaching produces ‘uncomfortable moments’, defensiveness or complaint-driven silencing often follows, and those naming systemic harm are often framed as ‘the problem’ (Essed, 1996).

Such patterns constrain agency and devalue expertise, generating moral injury, chronic burnout, and professional precarity. Students are also affected as curricula can become fragmented when educators lack capacity to implement inclusive or decolonial practices. The tension between transformative aspirations and institutional resistance produces sustained exhaustion and disillusionment. Addressing these fractures requires intentional repair, collective care, and renewed commitment to the purpose of transformative learning.

Institutional Courage and the Ethics of Collective Transformation

Reclaiming transformative learning requires approaching it as a political, ethical, and relational process, rather than a technical strategy or ideological contest (Hoggan & Kloubert, 2020; Michelson, 2019). Transformation is not about exerting ‘power over’ worldviews or achieving managerial goals but about cultivating conditions for collective inquiry, dialogue, and ethical engagement. In this work, the affective labour of equity practitioners – holding communities, translating grief, and sustaining commitments to justice – remains indispensable.

Institutional structures mediate what is possible. Governance practices, resource allocation, and decision-making authority shape the material and relational conditions that enable sustained efforts towards equity, while practices of care, solidarity, and repair acknowledge the emotional and ethical demands of this labour. Transformation, therefore, must be understood not as the fulfilment of strategic goals but as a practice of relational accountability enacted across the institution.

Such work cannot be accomplished through rhetoric or passive endorsement. It requires institutional courage – confronting structural barriers, refusing to normalize fractures, reimagining practice, and committing resources to meaningful repair. Higher education can take transformative learning seriously only by standing with the practitioners who sustain it and creating the conditions for durable, collective change.

From a transformative learning perspective, responding to these challenges requires attention to the collective conditions under which critical reflection, dialogic engagement, and relational accountability can be sustained over time. Rather than positioning equity practitioners as isolated agents of change, transformative learning informed approaches foreground shared meaning-making, institutional responsibility, and the redistribution of authority as prerequisites for ethical transformation. Future research might therefore examine how such collective and relational conditions are enabled or foreclosed within contemporary higher education institutions. Such inquiry could explore how structural and relational conditions shape everyday practice, assess the impact of organizational strategies, and deepen understanding of the emotional and ethical complexities that underpin transformative change.