‘It felt wrong’: emotional labour and the everyday reconfiguration of refugee governance in Cameroon

This article examines how emotional labour shapes the everyday implementation of forced migration governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon, it explores how refugee aid providers’ emotional responses—including frustration, empathy, and ethical discomfort—inform situated forms of judgement in their daily work. Building on the emotional turn in the social sciences, emotions are conceptualized as epistemic dispositions through which actors interpret institutional tensions and, in some cases, act upon them. The analysis identifies three pathways through which emotional labour contributes to reconfiguring refugee assistance from within: pragmatic adaptations that soften bureaucratic rigidity; improvised forms of inclusion and relational alliances that challenge categorical boundaries; and structural engagements that support alignment with state institutions. These findings show how emotional labour makes visible institutional contradictions and informs practical adjustments, while remaining shaped by organizational constraints and unequal power relations, offering a more situated and embodied understanding of refugee governance in practice.