Sleep Cultures
  • Home
  • Bibliography
  • Research and Researchers
  • News and Notes
  • Quotations
  • Images
  • Links
  • Contact Us

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

9/25/2015

0 Comments

 

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

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    Art And Literature
    Body Clocks And Chronotypes
    Capitalism
    Cognition
    Conferences/events
    Crime
    Critical Sleep Studies
    Ethics
    History
    Humour
    Insomnia
    Philosophy
    Pleasure
    Politics
    Public Sleep
    Religion
    Sleep And The Human
    Sleep Environments
    Sleep Medicine
    Sleep Schedules
    Sleep Science
    Sport
    Technology
    Transport
    War
    Work

    RSS Feed