| Sumario: | Surveying recent developments in management and work culture, computing and social media, and science and psychology, this article speculates on the concept of emotional extraction. Emotional extraction is defined in two ways. One iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in the work of producing new technology, such as emotionally aware computers. A second instance of emotional extraction entails the use of emotion knowledge – or theories about emotions, such as emotional intelligence – to generate conclusions or predictions about human behaviour. Emotional extraction in service work, management, marketing, social media, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience are discussed. ‘Mining the mind’ focuses in particular on emotional extraction that enhances both productivity and predictability, in turn tracing how emotionally extractive sites are implicated within the production and hierarchical valuation of difference – especially racial and gendered, but also neural difference – in everyday life. The article aims to offer scholars in cultural studies, as well as critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical disability studies, ways to think about this newly intensifying resource extraction and the intersections of culture, capital, and human experience that such extraction indexes and makes possible.
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