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Enervated: Sleep at the Edge of the Social (Panel at SLSA 2021)


Enervated: Sleep at the Edge of the Social

ABSTRACT. Sleep ailments are a chronic condition of the current moment, unevenly distributed across populations and a site of social risk. And yet responsibility for good sleep is reframed as an individual responsibility to manage, and dealing with chronic sleep problems becomes an isolating burden, lived as a private and invisible experience. This is how we have come to commonly think of sleep. But sleep is, insistently, much more social than it might seem. In sleep, we become radically vulnerable in a way that requires social forms of care. Sleep exists at a critical threshold—between public and private, individual and collective, body and environment—that allows us to reimagine novel social relations of collective care. This panel explores a sleeper subjectivity-- the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others—in relation to the contemporary crisis of enervated rest. Across sites of sleep—performance, media, design and tech-- we search for the edges of sleep’s sociability as a means to undoing exhaustion and to rework affects of distress, terror, discomfort into more sustainable forms.


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September 29

Sleep Salon #1 The Social Lives of Sleep, with M. Wolf-Meyer & C. Alcántara

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October 13

Sleep Salon 2: The Future of (the History of) Sleep w/ K Kroker and B Reiss