The unheard path: carer loneliness and epistemic injustice in critical and historical view

Abstract This article analyses a corpus of longitudinal interview evidence on the experiences of family carers in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic, and situates them in a longer historical, philosophical, and political discussion. Drawing on feminist epistemology, medical humanities, loneliness studies, and interdisciplinary scholarship on care, it rethinks carer loneliness and epistemic constraint as the mingled products of a series of overlapping abandonments, across short, medium, and long-term temporalities. Discussing loneliness, touch, solitude, shame, and social and cultural invisibility in the stories told by carers about their lives before and during COVID, it then pulls focus to a historical analysis of post-war discourses on care, which simultaneously noted and naturalised the exclusion of carers from emergent imaginings of health and thriving.