Understanding the Complexity of Pacing in Long Covid: A New Approach to Chronic Illness

For millions with Long Covid and energy-limiting conditions, pacing is survival. While most research focuses on causes and treatments, this book examines the overlooked 'long' of Long Covid and its many temporal disruptions.

Drawing on complex realism and thousands of social media posts, the authors reframe pacing as temporal labour: exhausting, invisible work where limits only become visible once crossed. They introduce polyrhythmic biographical disruption, where disruption is not a single event but ongoing, and the uncanny-not-yetness: the eerie limbo of post-exertional malaise.

This book advocates for temporal justice, because pacing is always, irreducibly social.

Emma Uprichard is Reader at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick.

Sam Martin is Senior Research Fellow & Big Qualitative Data Lead at the Vaccines & Society Unit, University of Oxford, and the Digital Society Research Cluster, Manchester Metropolitan University.