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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 approach Long Covid through Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Inspired by Le Guin’s call to move away from “the killer story” and instead tell “the life story” of how life is collectively kept together, carried and nurtured, I foreground the fragile life stories of those who contracted COVID-19 but did not get well. They named their illness Long Covid before medicine recognised their condition and they are still often told by doctors that “it’s all in your head”. Drawing on interviews with Swedish Long Covid sufferers, the presentation examines how an often highly energy-limiting chronic illness reshapes their lives.

While STS research on care and chronic conditions often mobilises the ordinaries of life through the notion of “the everyday” as an analytical site of tinkering and care, and “chronic living” scholarship emphasises the temporal reorganisation of “the everyday” under chronic conditions, my analysis suggests that Long Covid exposes the very fragility of the mundane. Activities such as shopping, walking, or showering, once taken for granted, become contingent on scarce and fluctuating energy reserves. Amid this, sufferers develop various energy budgeting practices to manage their depleted bodies.

Building on Le Guin, I thus distinguish between the everyday as an analytical site and temporal unfolding, and the mundane as both something ascribed, for instance by doctors, and something that must be practically achieved. Long Covid renders visible both the trivialisation of life-sustaining practices and the fragile conditions through which they become mundane.