Project Somnolence

Project: Internally funded project

Project Details

Description

Everyone sleeps and is affected by sleep, but we don’t all sleep the same. Sleep inequalities are associated with differences in class, gender and environmental factors. This project attends to sleep through issues of sustainability, health and wellbeing. It is an interdisciplinary, practice-led scoping project which affords opportunities for situating our research with different sites and publics across Scotland. The goal is to secure a bedrock of research partnership ahead of an AHRC Catalyst grant in 2024, building a network of contributors and stakeholders across HEIs, industry and wider publics.

Strathclyde is already home to the Strathclyde Centre for Sleep Health (based in the Department of Psychological Sciences & Health) and this project will address the knowledge gap of arts-based methods for engaging with sleep, forging cross-department opportunities for collaboration, REF-eligible output and future knowledge exchange. We will use creative-critical methods under a broadly environmental humanities approach to investigate somnolence (a desire for sleep) within discussions about ‘chronodiversity’ (the different ways people experience embodied time).

Real impact on global public health and sustainability can be achieved by improving societal understandings of sleep’s importance and the factors that affect it— from chronic stress to daylight savings. For Jonathan Crary, the 24/7 pulse of attention and demand within late capitalism encroaches upon our sleep health. The framing of 24/7 — from on-demand rolling news to social media and increasingly precarious labour patterns — normalises ‘the idea of working without pause, without limits’ (Crary). This conception of endless availability and accumulation is inextricable from the kinds of capitalist growth and extraction which have instigated planetary-scale levels of ecological crisis.

This project embodies Strathclyde values of innovation, boldness and collaboration. We will undertake a practice-research residency, an engagement tour visiting Scottish HEIs, arts organisations and schools, with a public-facing sharing event held at the end of this project. Given the success of our recent ‘Somnolent Cartographies’ session at Civic House (funded by UKRI NERC), we are confident that sleep ecologies is a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary interest with real potential for creative-critical innovation.

This includes building experimental methods around sleep, temporality, and ecology in a rural environment which provides a productive point of comparison to our ongoing urban-based research.

Layman's description

Everyone sleeps and is affected by sleep, but we don’t all sleep the same. Sleep inequalities are associated with differences in class, gender and environmental factors. This project attends to sleep through issues of sustainability, health and wellbeing. We will use creative-critical methods under a broadly environmental humanities approach to investigate somnolence (a desire for sleep) within discussions about ‘chronodiversity’ (the different ways people experience embodied time).

Notes

Funded by Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund at University of Strathclyde (£2000) and Dear Green Bothy at University of Glasgow (£2000), Scotland-wide, May-August 2024.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/05/2431/07/24

UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This project contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals

Keywords

  • sleep
  • somnolence
  • music
  • poetry
  • practice-led
  • research
  • health
  • residency
  • performance
  • landscape
  • soundscape
  • deep listening
  • commonplace book
  • sonic ecologies
  • workshop
  • wellbeing
  • sustainability
  • embodied knowledges

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