What can we learn about the future of sleep by studying its histories? Part of the Sleep Salons: A Series of Interdisciplinary Conversations
Speakers:
Kenton Kroker (Social Science, York University)
Benjamin Reiss (English, Emory University)
What can we learn about the future of sleep by studying its cultural, imaginative and scientific histories? Despite its status as non-experience, sleep has evolved into a perennial subject of cultural conversation, as well as a rigorously scrutinized object of scientific inquiry. How does tracing the often wayward and neglected histories of sleep enable us to think about where sleep is headed in the 21st century?
✦ Benjamin Reiss is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Chair of English at Emory University. His book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World uses literary history and cultural analysis to contextualize and critique the norms and pressures that every sleeper struggles to accommodate.
✦ Kenton Kroker is Associate Professor of Social Science at York University, where he is affiliated with the Health & Society program. His book The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research traces the evolution of the modern sleep laboratory and considers the technological and biopolitical forces that have contributed to the contemporary biomedicalization of sleep.
Moderated by Josh Dittrich, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sociability of Sleep project. He writes about sound, media and environment and is currently pursing two projects: a book manuscript on the planetary scaling of sound and listening titled Geosonics, as well as a new project on “so(m)niferous media” that attends to the ways sleepers sonically (re)mediate their environments and experiences.
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The Sleep Salons are curated by Josh Dittrich (Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal), Aleksandra Kaminska (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), and Alanna Thain (Associate Professor, McGill University). They are part of a year-long series:
Salon 1: The Social Lives of Sleep, ft. M. Wolf-Meyer & C. Alcántara: September 29
Salon 2: The Future of (the History of) Sleep, ft. K. Kroker & B. Reiss: October 13
Salon 3: Traumatic Sleep, ft. Franny Nudelman & Judite Blanc: November 17
Salon 4: Controlling Dreams, ft. Antonio Zadra & Elizaveta Solomonava: December 8
The Sociability of Sleep is two-year research program that explores both everyday and exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. Launching our programming this Fall are the Sleep Salons, monthly public sessions featuring scholars, artists, and researchers on sleep, showcasing innovative research though conversations that examine how we learn and know about sleep, and that question and expand the methodologies, epistemologies, and equities of sleep knowledge. Exploring the value of sleep research in art and design, humanities, and social sciences, and taking experiential, experimental, critical, and sociable approaches to sleep, each monthly Salon pairs short talks (ca. 25 minutes) from two featured speakers to generate interdisciplinary insights in the ensuing discussion about the sociability of sleep.
The Sociability of Sleep and its Sleep Salons are supported by funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).