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Paper short abstract

This presentation focuses on Long Covid as a temporal reconfiguration in which patient knowledge is a crucial resource in negotiating disrupted pasts, contested presents, and uncertain futures.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines temporality, Long Covid, and patient knowledge. Temporality is embedded even in the naming of the condition. Long Covid foregrounds that it is lasting, whereas Post Covid implies a transient, time-bounded aftermath. The terminology itself reflects and shapes how the condition is understood.

Empirically, the analysis is based on 43 interviews with Long Covid sufferers in Sweden. The presentation is organised around four interrelated themes, each addressing how sufferers experience time and how they use patient knowledge to navigate frictions between competing temporalities.

The first theme explores how Long Covid generates “biographical disruptions”, unsettling life trajectories and previously taken-for-granted futures. The second examines the temporalities of primary health care and the frictions they produce. Specific attention is paid to tensions surrounding a standardised test used to assess cardiopulmonary functional capacity.

The third theme considers the rhythm of Long Covid, foregrounding pacing and setbacks as central organising features of everyday life. The final theme turns to the future. Here, hope and expectations directed toward biomedicine coexist with uncertainty, recalibration, and, for some, an emerging embrace of slowness.

Together, these themes illuminate how Long Covid is not only a medical condition but also a temporal reconfiguration, one in which patient knowledge becomes a crucial resource for negotiating disrupted pasts, contested presents, and uncertain futures.