Reconfiguring Power, Policy and Emotional Labour: A Bibliometric Mapping and Critical Synthesis of Leadership Mechanisms and NNEST Identity in Secondary Schools (2020–2025)

Research on language teacher emotional labour has expanded substantially, and recent scholarship includes both psychological and sociopolitical accounts of teachers’ emotional lives. However, within the 2020–2025 literature mapped in this review, leadership and institutional conditions are not always foregrounded with the same analytical specificity as teacher-focused constructs such as burnout, resilience or regulation. To examine this pattern, the study combines bibliometric mapping of 103 records with a focused interpretive thematic synthesis of 14 studies situated in or directly relevant to secondary school contexts. The bibliometric results show a field organised mainly around emotional labour, burnout, identity and teacher psychology vocabularies, with leadership and policy terms less prominent at the keyword level. The thematic synthesis identifies three recurrent school-level mechanisms through which emotional labour is discussed: accountability and governance, micropolitical recognition and exclusion, and support arrangements that shape how emotional burdens are shared or individualised. Across the 14 studies, non-native English-speaking teacher (NNEST) positioning and racialisation are most visible in studies that explicitly foreground legitimacy and marginalisation, but less visible in more generic studies of support or accountability. The review concludes that future research and practice would benefit from more clearly specifying institutional mechanisms and examining how secondary school conditions and NNEST positioning shape teachers’ emotional labour.