Resilience as social practice: Negotiating long COVID at the intersection of illness and ageing

Resilience is often framed within neoliberal health discourses as an individual capacity for adaptation, obscuring how the ability to endure illness is socially organised. This article reconceptualises resilience as a biographically embedded social practice through a study of older and emerging older adults living with Long COVID, an uncertain chronic health condition that unsettles everyday life and expectations of ageing. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data from a UK study comprising three phases of 23 interviews (2021-2023), this article presents four illustrative cases of participants aged over 50. Rather than a static attribute, resilience was a dynamic and often painful process in which participants situated the present in relation to past experiences and (un)imagined futures, while seeking to maintain a coherent sense of self amid disruption. This work was enacted through everyday practices such as adjusting routines, renegotiating roles and seeking recognition in healthcare and social relationships. These efforts were enabled or constrained by social conditions, including institutional acknowledgement, material resources and normative expectations of ageing, sometimes leading resilience to be performed rather than authentically experienced. A central finding is that resilience involved learning to live with ambiguity. An uncertain prognosis disrupted biographical continuity and required continual recalibration of temporal horizons, often producing experiences of accelerated or disjunct ageing. Resilience therefore emerged not as recovery but as the socially mediated maintenance of a liveable biography. Recognising resilience as social practice foregrounds the need to reorganise the institutional and relational conditions that make endurance possible.