Balancing care and control
Emotional labour and dignity in a solidarity restaurant
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11431920 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maria Sarmento (0000-0001-9433-9707, University of Minho, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Social Policy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0261-0183 • E-ISSN: 1461-703X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/02610183251388369 |
| OpenAlex | W4415591113 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 47 |
This study examines the lived experiences of food insecurity and volunteer work in a Portuguese solidarity restaurant using a reflexive autoethnographic approach based on two years of participant observation. Situating personal narratives within the frameworks of stigma, care ethics, and emotional labour, it explores the moral dilemmas, affective demands, and power dynamics inherent in food aid work. Findings reveal persistent tensions between institutional control and relational care, as volunteers navigate compassion, rule enforcement, and ethical discomfort. These dynamics are conceptualised in the Tension Triangle Model of Food Aid Work, which maps the interplay between institutional expectations, volunteer emotional burden, and recipient agency. Recipients, in turn, manage stigma, resist dependency, and assert dignity within constrained aid systems. By employing a reflexive, first-person methodology, this study challenges dominant narratives of humanitarian aid, exposing the emotional and structural complexities of caregiving and the unintended hierarchies embedded in voluntary work. It advocates for dignity-centred, ethically grounded approaches to food assistance that move beyond paternalism and toward inclusive, justice-oriented support
Autonomy · Care work · Dignity · Emotional labor · Narrative · Participant observation · Paternalism · Qualitative research · Reflexivity · Solidarity · Employment and Welfare Studies · Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations · Homelessness and Social Issues
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020
Food Bank Nations
Hunger pains
Food banks, welfare, and food insecurity in Canada
Interventions to address household food insecurity in high-income countries
Moral Boundaries
Trajectories and predictors of emotional exhaustion in clinical nurses in the context of healthcare crisis
Handbook of Autoethnography
Autoethnography as Method
Counteracting Stigma-Power
The Role of Job Demands–Resources (JDR) between Service Workers’ Emotional Labor and Burnout
How the social dignity of recipients is violated and protected across various forms of food aid in high-income countries
The ethical dilemmas of foodbanking
After Liberalism in World Politics? Towards an International Political Theory of Care
Food Bank Usage Is a Poor Indicator of Food Insecurity
The Incompatibility of System and Lifeworld Understandings of Food Insecurity and the Provision of Food Aid in an English City
Navigating entangled shame
Disciplinary and pastoral power, food and poverty in late-modernity
Sweet Charity , revisited
Burnout among volunteers in the social services
The “dark side” of food banks? Exploring emotional responses of food bank receivers in the Netherlands
Using thematic analysis in psychology
A Genealogy of Dependency
What do you mean by that
The geographies of food banks in the meantime
In and beyond New Labour
Contested space
Thinking and acting outside the charitable food box
HIV and Aids-related stigma and discrimination
A dual debrief-based co-autoethnography of a humanitarian delegation member
Ways to care
Lasses are much easier to get on with
Ethics in Autoethnography and Collaborative Autoethnography
Murky moralities
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |