Somnambulations: New Directions in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sleep

A Graduate Colloquium organized by The Sociability of Sleep

January, 28 | 9.30am – 5pm EST | On Zoom

Find the event on Facebook

Somnambulations: New Directions in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sleep is a full-day colloquium featuring graduate students and emerging scholars addressing sleep from a variety of disciplinary contexts. It embodies the critical and creative sociocultural approach to sleep and sleep science that is fundamental to the Sociability of Sleep project.

Please note that due to current social distancing regulations in Québec, this event will now be entirely hosted online. Recordings of the events will be made available on our YouTube channel, with links posted on our website: sociabilityofsleep.ca

**************************************

• Welcome and opening remarks (9:30am)

Aleksandra Kaminska (Communication, Université de Montréal) and Alanna Thain (English, McGill University)

• Panel 1 (9:30am-10:20am) Sleeping Soundly

Devon Bate (Media Studies, Concordia University): “Spectacular Rest: How to Sleep in the Attention Economy”

Josh Dittrich (Communication, Culture & Technology, University of Toronto): “Counting Sheep Beats: Toward a Sonic Materialism of Sleep”

Moderator: Aleksandra Kaminska (Communication, Université de Montréal)

• Panel 2 (10:30am-11:20am) Sleep’s Creative Thresholds

Cedric Kayser (French Language and Literature, Université de Montréal): “Bodily Atmospheres: The Impact of Ambient Music on the First Stage of Sleep (N1)”

Sandra Huber (Interdisciplinary Humanities, Concordia University): “SleepWriter: Composing the Electricity of Sleep”

Moderator: Josh Dittrich

• Panel 3 (11:30am-1:00pm) Critiquing Norms in Sleep and Sleep Research

Ryan Staples (Humanities, York University): “To Whom Does the Dream Belong? Negotiating Expertise in the Early History of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD)”

Josianne Barrette-Moran (Bioethics, McGill University): “Let the Night Owls In: A Patient-as-Partner Approach to Actualizing Sleep Assessment Tools”

Kristie Serota (Public Health, University of Toronto): “Unstitching the Sleep Industrial Complex: Reflections on the Medicalization and Commodification of Sleep”

Moderator: Elizaveta Solomonova (Psychiatry, McGill University)

• BREAK (1:00pm-2:15pm)

• Panel 4 (2:15pm-3:45pm) Arts of Rest and Resistance

Josie Roland Hodson (African American Studies and History of Art, Yale University): “Rest Notes: On Sleep and Black Contemporary Art”

Stacey Cann (Art Education, Concordia University): “Rest, Slowness, and the Morality of Labour”

Victoria Stanton (Art Education, Concordia University): “Modeling Rest, Cuing Recovery: On Activating (Doing) Nothing in the Revitalized Third Place”

Moderator: Natalie Doonan (Communication, Université de Montréal)

• Performance (4pm) Bureau of Noncompetitive Research

Steeped In

Introduced by Josh Dittrich

**************************************

Somnambulations is organized by Aleksandra Kaminska (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), Alanna Thain (Associate Professor, McGill University), Josh Dittrich (UofT), and Erandy Vergara (Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociability of Sleep).

The Sociability of Sleep is two-year research program supported by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) that explores both everyday and exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. The Colloquium is also supported by a bursary from the Canadian Communication Association.