Oral Presentation by Hernan Camilo Pulido-Martinez¹, Daniel Camilo Palacios-Medina¹, Kelly Natali Coca-Peña
¹ Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 13
Abstract
This paper presents advances from a study that adopts a critical, socio-historical, and political–economic perspective to examine the entanglements between transformations in labor regimes and the configuration of psychological practices in Colombia. Drawing on an archive of narratives produced by psychologists who graduated from the Faculty of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana across four generational cohorts (1986–1990, 1996–2000, 2006–2010, and 2016–2020), the study critically reconstructs how professional interventions have been shaped by, and have contributed to, broader processes of labor restructuring, neoliberal reform, and the intensification of precariousness. These cohorts entered professional practice under markedly unequal and historically specific labor conditions, reflecting shifting configurations of power, governance, and subjectivity in the world of work. The first generation developed their practices within relatively stable employment arrangements, largely informed by managerial and human relations paradigms aligned with Fordist labor relations. The second generation entered the labor market amid processes of economic liberalization, privatization, and early flexibilization. The third generation built their professional trajectories in a context of intensified flexibilization, characterized by contractual fragmentation, the normalization of self-entrepreneurship, and the expansion of “light” psychological technologies such as coaching and self-management discourses. The fourth generation has entered an increasingly precarious and algorithmically mediated labor landscape, shaped by deindustrialization, automation, and digitalization. The archive is being constructed through oral history interviews that document situated narratives of professional practice, using a snowball sampling strategy to capture relational and institutional trajectories. The resulting historical account is developed in dialogue with critical methodologies in the history and sociology of psychology. Rather than treating psychological practice as a neutral technical activity, the study analyzes it as a historically contingent form of labor governance and subjectivation. Overall, the project contributes a critical history of contemporary psychology in Colombia by situating professional practices within processes of psychologization, neoliberal regulation, and social inequality.