The everyday social geographies of living with Long Covid

Feather, Ellys (2026) The everyday social geographies of living with Long Covid. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 pandemic was widely framed as an acute, time-limited crisis, for many people its effects persisted, giving rise to Long Covid — a novel, heterogeneous and often contested chronic condition that continues to shape everyday life long after the pandemic is widely assumed to be over. This thesis offers the first sustained geographical analysis of Long Covid grounded in the everyday lived experiences of those affected. Drawing on 26 in-depth qualitative interviews and four online focus groups with people living with Long Covid in the UK, it examines how the condition reshapes the spatial, temporal and embodied organisation of everyday life. Adopting a qualitative geographical lens, the thesis understands Long Covid not simply as a biomedical aftermath of infection, but as a lived, relational and unevenly distributed experience shaped by fluctuating bodily capacities, institutional uncertainty and broader socio-spatial inequalities.

Central to the analysis is the framing of Long Covid as an energy-limiting condition. Across participants’ accounts, energy emerged as a scarce, volatile and costly resource that reorganised everyday routines, relationships and participation across domestic, workplace, clinical and digital environments. These new and uncertain energy limits produced a profound bio-geo-graphical disruption, requiring participants to re-learn how to live with their bodies, time and spaces in the absence of coherent clinical knowledge or recovery trajectories. Energy was not only materially constrained but affectively lived — anticipated, exhausted, feared and hoped for — shaping how bodies attuned to limits and possibilities in everyday life. Developing this insight, the thesis conceptualises energy as a biopolitical currency that is continually banked, withdrawn, expended and mis-spent as individuals navigate care, work, legitimacy and survival through both intimate and collective embodied knowledge amid evolving, often contested and inconsistently applied forms of clinical guidance.

Conceptually, the thesis contributes to health and cultural geography by advancing new energy geographies that foreground energy, affect and everyday labour at the intimate embodied scale of chronic illness. Methodologically, it offers insights into conducting ethical and inclusive qualitative research with people living with chronic, fluctuating and energy-limiting conditions. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that Long Covid is not only a biomedical condition but a profoundly geographical one, lived through disrupted relations between energy, body, space, time and power, and argue for sustained attentiveness to the everyday geographies through which chronic, energy-limiting illness is lived, negotiated and endured.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: This research would not have been possible without funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 1+3 award, the Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS) and the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences (GES).
• Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General); G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
• Funder's Name: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS), School of Geographical and Earth Sciences (GES)
• Supervisor's Name: Philo, Professor Christopher, Callard, Professor Felicity and McGeachan, Dr. Cheryl
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85853
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 31 Mar 2026 13:04
• Last Modified: 31 Mar 2026 13:04
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85853
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85853