Welcome to the last episode of this season of the podcast. This is the one with all the claims. Élaina grapples with three themes that have emerged during this phase in the Massively Disabled journey and muses on what will come next. She is joined by Professor Nisreen Alwan, of Southampton University, and Christina Cortez, two people with lived experience of long COVID.

Texts mentioned in the episode:

My Cruel Teacher - Long COVID by Nisreen Alwan

Body Politic

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 4, Chapter 4, translated by Rickaby, by Thomas Aquinas

Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing by Mel Y. Chen, in Crip Authorship, pp. 33-37

Step into the crip time warp with Élaina, Professor Felicity Callard, and Dr Mich Ciurria to discuss how we create knowledge of, about, and on illness. We discuss the “non-binary” category of illness, academic fantasies about research co-production, and why disabled people should be the ones who define disability. Everyone on this episode is a disabled academic with various levels of job security, all of whom made the gamble to be extremely vulnerable. I entrust them in your care.

In this episode, Élaina talks to Jackie Baxter of the Long COVID Podcast and Peter Keogh, a professor of Health and Society at the Open University, about disabled knowledges of care. We trek through the history of HIV activism to better understand what is at stake when living with a chronic illness explodes the boundaries of what biomedicine can address. Oh, and this is the one where we talk about cripistemologies.

This one is for the kids. Long COVID can affect anyone at any age, but growing up with a chronic illness means you are learning who you are while realising who you will never be. This one is for the epidemic survivors who are still here, still around, even though the disease that changed your life is no longer the hot topic. This one is for the people living with post-polio who were told it was all in their heads. If that sounds familiar, this one is for you too. It’s for all of us. We need to talk to each other.

CN: This episode contains discussions of medical disbelief and trauma.

Episode 2: How to Pack Like a Methodology Queen, in which Élaina makes sure your narrative attentiveness is snug in your pack between interdisciplinarity and a writerly text.