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As a group of people who work intimately with words, we began inspecting this sentence. On closer examination, it appeared an oxymoron. And then not really; after all, even love requires work and continued effort. When love enters a labour-centred sentence – “I love my job,” “I love what I do for a living,” “it is a labour of love,” “I love writing/editing/being creative” – the work is made [removed]; Alarm bells of warnings against capitalism’s tendency to consume even our free time and inner emotional energy go off. Against such alarms, we want to question if there is such a thing as a ‘labour of love’.
We throw the ball to you; what is a ‘labour of love’? What consequences does the entanglement of the two have? What drives us to accept jobs that forgo adequate monetary compensation for the work we do, only to be ‘paid’ in exposure, experience, or emotional fulfilment? We decided to focus this issue exactly on labour and labourers of love; those whose jobs require the practice of care and compassion, those working fields that demand employing a repertoire of feelings, as well as those whose passion is also their job. Acknowledging the juxtaposition of the phrase, we want to respond to both ends of the spectrum; what’s the love in labour and what’s the labour in love?
Proposals (200-300 words) with attached résumés and related image material can be submitted until 18 April 2021 via
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