Exhausting care

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

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4592988
AutoresTammy Rhodes (0000-0003-2400-9838, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, autor correspondente), 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)
Ano2024
Volume343
Páginas116617
Data de publicação2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
EditoraElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116617
PMID38277763
OpenAlexW4391091082
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas61

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