Meg Aebig

Meg Aebig is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph. Her research is situated in the sociology of work, occupations, and emotions, with a focus on mental health and well-being in animal-care work. Her dissertation Good Care on the Clock: Work Organization, Emotional Labour, and Well-Being in Corporate and Private Small-Animal Veterinary Clinics, examines small-animal veterinary clinics as workplaces where care, responsibility, and emotional labour are organized across veterinarians, veterinary technicians, animal care attendants, and reception staff.

Through a comparison of privately owned and corporate-owned small-animal clinics, Meg’s doctoral research explores how workplace organization shapes workers’ everyday experiences of “good care” and “good work.” Her work asks how clinic pace, staffing, client-facing accountability, difficult decision-making, role hierarchy, and emotional expectations shape the demands of veterinary work and the mental health and well-being of workers.

Informed by an insider-adjacent relationship to the veterinary profession and community, her work is grounded in both sociological inquiry and a deep respect and appreciation for the people who provide care in animal-care settings. More broadly, her research interests include emotional labour, care work, animal-care work, veterinary medicine, workplace mental health, professional identity, dirty work, recognition, and qualitative methods, particularly workplace ethnography and semi-structured interviewing.