Exhausting care

On the collateral realities of caring in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic

Bibliographic Data

ID4592988
AuthorsTammy Rhodes (0000-0003-2400-9838, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, corresponding author), Maria Paula Ruiz Osorio (0000-0002-7221-9058, Universidad de Antioquia), Adriana Maldonado (0000-0001-8227-5048, Columbia University), Alexandra Restrepo Henao, Alexandra Restrepo (0000-0002-3718-4558, Universidad de Antioquia), K Lancaster (0000-0002-2411-7970, Goldsmiths University of London)
Year2024
Volume343
Pages116617
Publication date2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116617
PMID38277763
OpenAlexW4391091082
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited61

We explore care as a site of multiplicity and tension. Working with the qualitative interview accounts of nineteen health care workers in Colombia, we trace a narrative of 'exhausting care' in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Accounts relate exhausting care to working without break in response to extraordinary demand, heightened contagion concern, the pressures of caring in the face of anticipated death, and efforts to carry on caring in the face of constraint. We bring together the work of John Law (2010, 2011) on 'collateral realities' with Lauren Berlant's (2011) thesis of 'cruel optimism' to explore care as a site of practice in which the promise of the good can also become materialised as harm, given structural conditions. Through the reflexive narrative of 'carrying on' in the face of being 'worn down' by care, a narrative which runs through health care worker accounts, we draw attention to the collateral realities of exhausting care as personal and political, at once a practice of endurance and extraction. We argue that the exhausting care that relates to the extraordinariness of the Covid-19 pandemic also resides in the ordinariness, and slower violence, of the everyday. The cruel optimism of care is a relation in which the labour of care reproduces a harmful situation

Care work · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Criminology · Harm · Health care · Narrative · Pandemic · Political science · Sociology · Work (physics · COVID-19 and Mental Health · Employment and Welfare Studies · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Psychology