Emma Uprichard

For millions with Long Covid and energy-limiting conditions, pacing is not self-care; it 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.

This book argues that there is a need to rethink time in social research. It builds on the author's previous research, which has dealt with the methodological challenge of studying change and continuity in the social world from a complex systems perspective. The book: sets out key empirical challenges of social time and temporality;problematizes time in key quantitative, qualitative and simulation social research methods;proposes some methodological alternatives that seek to tackle time and temporality empirically from innovative angles.In so doing, the book aims to provoke a wider discussion about the need for methodological innovation about how social time and temporality are addressed in empirical social research.

In today’s world, there are interwoven crises affecting us at every level. This book explores the impact of these crises on applied social research. It shows how using a complexity framework in research is key to tackling global challenges effectively. By featuring illustrative examples from the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa and the US, the authors demonstrate how an action research programme based around the use of existing social research methods embedded in processes of co-production and participation can drive real-time social change. In doing so, the book highlights the transformative role of action-oriented research in addressing today's complex global challenges.