This presentation explores the presenters’ lived experiences as social justice agents engaging in emotional labor in anti-trafficking work, and underscores self-care as an essential means for remaining present, effective, and compassionate in the pursuit of justice. Grounded in a critical feminist framework, they conceptualize emotional labor as legitimate labor and draw on lived experience to illustrate how self-care is not an individual indulgence, but an ethical and professional necessity. They will begin by sharing how their work as researchers, practitioners, and advocates is emotionally demanding, requiring sustained, wholehearted engagement and attunement with people. The personal impact of such work has included overwhelm, and physical and emotional fatigue. To manage these impacts, restore balance, and maintain wholehearted connection to the work, they have found creative and embodied practices to be necessary, such as poetry, painting, collage, theatre, cooking, journaling, and nature mapping. They also found other relational and protective practices such as community care circles and digital boundaries to be essential. They will share stories of these practices and will provide attendees with opportunities to identify personally meaningful and sustainable care practices. Their experiences are not unique; researchers, practitioners, and advocates in this field routinely engage in intensive emotional labor, including witnessing trauma and its aftermath and navigating systems of injustice. Such work creates heightened risk for burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary trauma. This presentation thus concludes with a call to action for researchers, practitioners, and advocates to recognize emotional labor as legitimate labor and to integrate sustainable self-care practices into their daily lives.
Trigger Warning: This presentation contains information (written, spoken, or visual) that may be triggering or (re)traumatizing to attendees.
Anchal Jain is an independent advocate, survivor leader, and researcher focused on anti-trafficking, public safety, policy making, and social justice. Drawing on lived experience and practice, she examines emotional labor and sustainable self-care in advocacy spaces. Her work integrates creative expression and community-informed approaches to support resilience and survivor-centered systems change initiatives.
Logan Knight is an assistant professor at the School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. As a survivor-researcher-advocate, she is committed to socially just, inclusive and equitable research with survivors. Her research focuses on resilience and renewing discourses in order to center the dignity and strengths of survivors of all kinds of trafficking, including ritual abuse.
Sheridan Waldrop is a wildlife artist and a retired nurse and social worker. As a survivor of human trafficking, she believes in research partnerships between the community and the academy as a powerful means of changing trafficking narratives and improving interventions. In particular, Sheridan seeks to promote survivor leadership in innovative and transformative research.