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Paper short abstract

In this presentation I draw on Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to examine how Long Covid destabilizes the mundane. Based on interviews with Swedish sufferers, I explore energy, carrying, and the fragility of life-sustaining practices beyond cure narratives.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation I rethink Long Covid through Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Inspired by Le Guin’s emphasis on not telling the often-told heroic story of Man in a bloody battle with nature, this time triumphing over a virus, I will instead foreground the fragile life stories of those who did not recover – those who named their illness Long Covid before science even recognized their condition. Drawing on interviews with Swedish Long Covid sufferers, the presentation examines how energy-limiting chronic illness reshapes their lives.

While STS research on care often mobilizes the everyday as a site of tinkering and care and chronic living scholarship emphasizes the temporal reorganization of life with long-term conditions, the analysis suggests that Long Covid exposes something further: the fragility of the mundane itself. Activities such as shopping, walking, showering, or holding a conversation, once taken for granted, become contingent on scarce and fluctuating energy reserves. Through practices such as pacing, energy budgeting, and the ”spoon theory,” sufferers develop forms of patient knowledge to manage depleted bodies.

Building on Le Guin, the presentation distinguishes between the everyday as a site and temporal organisation of practice and the mundane as a normative downgrading of life-sustaining work. Long Covid renders visible how practices classified as trivial are in fact foundational to existence. Rather than stories of cure and defeat, Long Covid carrier stories are stories of endurance, adaptation, and the precarious maintenance of life.