What Sticks When Jobs Don’t: Identity, Emotion, and Precarity in EAL

Internationally trained EAL professionals often enter the field with strong hopes for stability, belonging, and long-term professional security. However, for many immigrant educators, even with prior experience and professional expertise, work in EAL contexts is shaped by temporary contracts, funding instability, and unexpected layoffs. This session examines how these structural conditions shape professional identity and teacher emotion across career stages for immigrant EAL professionals working in Canada Using the Korean film No Other Choice as a narrative anchor, the session explores experiences of job loss and precarity not as isolated events, but as identity-shaping moments. Drawing on affect theory (Ahmed, 2010), the presentation examines how concepts such as hope, professionalism, gratitude, and resilience operate as “sticky objects” that emotionally bind immigrant EAL professionals to institutions, even when working conditions are unstable. These attachments can intensify self-blame, silence, and emotional self-regulation following layoffs, particularly for educators who have invested migration, legitimacy, and future security in the profession. Alongside the film, the session incorporates lived narrative from internationally trained, experienced immigrant EAL professionals whose careers have unfolded across shifting institutional, immigration, and employment contexts. These narratives extend the film’s depiction of constraint by examining how hope is not erased under precarity, but reconfigured. Under insecure employment conditions, hope becomes less about institutional stability and more about naming structural conditions, sustaining professional relationships, and refusing to internalize precarity as personal failure. The session also draws on critical work on teacher emotion and professional identity (Benesch, 2017) to reframe emotional responses to precarity as institutionally produced rather than individual weakness. By foregrounding lived experience alongside theory, the presenters highlight how insecure employment destabilizes not only income, but EAL professionals’ sense of professional worth, belonging, and voice. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this session invites participants to engage in reframing and collective sense-making around emotion, identity, and precarity in EAL work. Participants will engage in guided reflection and leave with clearer language and perspectives for considering sustainability, equity, and retention in the EAL profession.