Exhausting care: On the collateral realities of caring in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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.

Los psicólogos como actores en la implementación de los acuerdos de paz: reflexiones, retos y alternativas / Psychologists as actors on the implementation of the peace accords: reflections, challenges and alternatives

La firma del acuerdo de paz entre el Gobierno de Colombia y las FARC-EP, abre para el país la oportunidad de construir la paz, que no se reduce a una firma entre las partes, sino que implica justamente la construcción social de una forma diferente de ser y hacer país. En este reto, la psicología como disciplina socialmente comprometida tiene un llamado, y a través de un texto de reflexión, se busca poner de presente los retos que para los profesionales tiene enfrentarse a un nuevo contexto, abriendo además alternativas posibles para hacerles frente.

The signing of the peace accords between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerilla group brings the opportunity for peace building, not reduced to the signature between the parties, but it implies the social construction of the different way of being a country and making it. In this challenge, psychology as a socially committed discipline has a responsibility and through a reflection text tries to keep the present challenges so that professionals who have to face a new context opening other possible alternatives to face.