User:Allanaaaaaaa/Vocational awe

Vocational awe is a theory developed by Fobazi Ettarh and first documented in the article "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves" in January 2018. Since that time the concept, originally used to describe the "calling" of librarianship, has been used to describe higher education broadly, archival science , scholarly communications , information literacy , and other fields. Studies have also explored the way vocational awe applies to different intersections including race, gender, and disability.

Vocational awe in its original sense was defined by Ettarh as "the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique." It is related to the the concept of occupational burnout and labor exploitation.

The term has gotten wider attention since 2020, when it was applied by Anne Helen Petersen to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic:

Before the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about how jobs with vocational awe — from librarians to teachers, from pastors to zookeepers — ironically expose the workers with those jobs to exploitation. Complain about pay? You don’t love the job enough. Attempt to unionize to advocate for a better safety net? You don’t love the job enough. Complain about systemic sexism, racism, or other exclusionary practices at your institution? You don’t love the job enough.... Yet these discourses of awe persist: enough to draw hundreds of thousands of people into professions where they are essentially signing up to advocate for compensation that matches their value for the rest of their lives.

Writers noted the pivot to remote and online learning during lockdown orders required a vocational-awe-style commitment from adjuncts and underpaid educators: "I believe something similar is at work with many non-tenure-track instructors who are able to sustain themselves at least partially on the knowledge that their work “matters” and without them hurling themselves into the breach of austerity, students would terribly harmed."Public library workers saw vocational awe used to reopen and continue library services during shutdowns.