“Knowing Otherwise”: Unsettling Notions of Crisis Within Contexts of Chronic Pain and Poverty in the COVID-19 Era

The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of significant crisis for most Canadians. For those living with chronic pain, it was a disproportionately challenging time. There have been calls for researchers to address the experiences of chronic pain during the time of pandemic, including for those who also struggle with systemic and structural marginalization. The purpose of this study was to highlight the experiences of people living with chronic pain and poverty during the pandemic. Guided by tenets of institutional ethnography, we highlight how the pandemic was often experienced as a source of temporary relief from pre-existing struggles and constituted an additional and unexceptional struggle. We also highlight how people drew on learned resourcefulness during this time, which can be understood as perseverance. Our findings indicate that the knowledge and experience gained from living with pre-existing, ongoing struggles contradicted pandemic narratives of crisis, adding nuance to the variability of experience. This calls attention to how the constructed nature of crisis may not align with the daily realities of those facing social inequities. We conclude that greater attention is needed on the social aspects that define people's lives, necessitating a role for critical social science within the chronic pain field.