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Injured Sleep:  one-day interdisciplinary colloquium, Aston University, 8 April 2016

9/25/2015

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Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) has brought to the attention of many the vital question of the purposes of sleep – a universal experience! Yet, while Crary defends the inviolable nature of sleep, a province that he says capitalism cannot as such exploit, the experience of injured sleep seems to be as universal as sleep itself. Scientific and clinical questioning of injured sleep ranges from the study of sleep’s physiology to the identification of physical environments or habits that prepare or disrupt somnolence. Injured sleep could be seen as a deprivation or an impaired form of wakefulness, a root cause of physical and mental illness, stress, cognitive difficulties with memory, concentration and problem solving, and, in the wider world, as a key factor in decreased productivity and personal or work-related accidents. All these debates are of on-going interest to a wide variety of bio-medical disciplines.

Understanding injured sleep, however, cannot be the work of medical and biological discourses alone.  As Marcel Mauss argued in 1934, while sleep is normally seen as a purely biological habit, our sleep unfolds in political, economic, psychological, social and cultural contexts too. Crary has problematized some of the economic questions that sleep evokes but the relationship of these to political, psychological, social and cultural agendas remains to be explored. Since sleep is what Neil Postman has called an invisible technology, ubiquitous and yet elusive, an interdisciplinary approach to its study is all the more urgent.

To what extent, therefore, is injured sleep a political issue in the age of 24/7 global affairs not only for politicians but for citizens? Does sleep need defending in some programmatic way or would that require a political and economic investment that late capitalism is not ready to make? What role does injured sleep play sociologically in the myriad relations – professional, familial, gendered, etc. – that define the individual? What from a psychological view drives sleepers to injure their own sleep? How and why has sleep been injured throughout history and across cultures? Why does the representation of sleep and injured sleep – from the spoken and written word to the fine arts – matter for wider debates about politics, culture and society? What impact do material cultures and technologies have on sleep, and how is sleep injured by them?

The aim of this colloquium will be to consider the reciprocal relations between these many contexts and the biological and clinical study of injured sleep. The conveners invite paper proposals of 250-300 words length along the lines suggested above (or any other related issue) for a one-day colloquium to be held at Aston University on Friday 8TH APRIL 2016.

Please send proposals to one of the following by 31st October:

Sarah Hayes: s.hayes@aston.ac.uk

Rob Sims: r.e.sims@aston.ac.uk

Brian Sudlow: b.sudlow@aston.ac.uk

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Max Richter's epic lullaby

9/3/2015

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A review of From Sleep, a one-hour 'offshoot' from Max Richter's eight-hour minimalist epic Sleep, a work described by its composer as a "personal lullaby for a frenetic world."
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Sleep Values symposium at Lancaster University, 11 September 2015

9/2/2015

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sleep values

One-day symposium, Lancaster University, Friday 11 September 2015
Organiser: Dr Michael Greaney (Dept. of English & Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
Funded by the Wellcome Trust  

Keynote Lecture (Fylde LT1, 9.30am):
Professor Colin Espie (Clinical Neuroscience, University of Oxford): ‘What is Sleep and Why Does it Matter?’

Symposium (FASS Meeting Room 2, 11.30am-6pm): Please visit http://bit.ly/1PWWJu8 where a detailed schedule will shortly be uploaded. Speakers will include:

 Dr Sasha Handley (History, University of Manchester); Prof. Hilary Hinds (English & Creative Writing, Lancaster University); Mr Patrick Levy (Philosophy, University of Sussex); Dr Penny Lewis (Psychology, University of Manchester); Dr William Maclehose (History of Science, University College London); Dr Rob Meadows (Sociology, University of Surrey); Dr Brigitte Steger (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge); Dr Stephen Thomson (English Literature, University of Reading)

 Everybody knows that sleep is valuable. No one seriously denies that regular periods of slumber are a worthwhile and indeed indispensable part of what it is to be human. However, accounts of the value of human slumber vary enormously. Proverbially, we know that good sleeping habits make a person "healthy, wealthy and wise" -- which is to say that sleep is deemed to have medical value, economic value, and cognitive value. But by what standard do we measure the relative value of these different kinds of value? Are they seamlessly compatible, or are there tensions, frictions or trade-offs between them? Are these values variable in different social and/or historical contexts? Are the sleep values of a given society always necessarily an expression of its waking priorities? Must sleep always be understood in terms of the services it performs to wakefulness (e.g. as a boost to alertness or daytime productivity) rather than as an end in itself?  And might there be something in sleep that resists evaluation --whether in aesthetic, ethical, financial, functionalist or utilitarian terms? “Sleep Values” will address these questions by inviting researchers from a range of different disciplines to reflect on what their research tells us about the value of sleep.

Attendance at the symposium is free but places are limited. If you would like to attend, please email
lindsey.king@lancaster.ac.uk to reserve a place. Please indicate in your message if you would like to attend the keynote lecture (Fylde LT1), the symposium (FASS MR2), or both.

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