The Role of Affective Labour in Expertise: Bringing Emotions Back into Expert Practices

In recent years, a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to how practices of digitalisation and datafication require medical professionals to work together with different stakeholders, and to how such collaborations shape expertise (Stevens, Wehrens, and de Bont 2020; Carboni et al. 2024). STS scholars have generally approached expertise as an epistemic and social endeavor, but they have tended to neglect the role affects and emotions play in its development and performance. In this paper, we provide a theoretical reflection on the relation between affective labour and expertise building upon Egher’s (2023) conceptualisation of expertise as a practical achievement realised through coordination and affective labour. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in various medical settings, including digital pathology, psychiatry, and datafication in intensive care, we explore what types of affective labour are conducted in digital healthcare, by whom, and with what consequences. We show how affective labour mediates both epistemic and relational practices. We argue that different affects and emotions are mobilised in these practices, which impacts the development and effective performance of expertise.