Sleep Salons
A SERIES OF INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATIONS
ON THE EPISTEMOLOGIES AND EQUITIES OF SLEEP
Each monthly Salon is organized around a theme to open up the discussion about what it means to think of sleep sociably. Each month pairs two featured speakers working in different fields to generate interdisciplinary insights in the ensuing discussion. Each presents a short talk of 25 minutes followed by an exchange between the speakers, moderator, and participants.
Salons are taking place on Zoom. Each Salon is recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.
Winter 2023
12/
SLEEP AS WORLDING
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
1pm–2:30pm EST (Zoom)
Sleep is often understood as a withdrawal from the world, a pause from the activity of life. However, in certain ways and in some contexts, sleeping is understood as an act of world-making. How so? And how then might we understand sleep as more than a passive support, and instead as a site for radical dreaming and re-imagining of relations, for ways of being and the horizon of experience?
In a conversation across Anishinaabe ontologies, queer lifeworlds and the work of Taiwanese artist Tsai Ming-liang, Dolleen Manning and Nicholas de Villiers will explore philosophies and practices of sleep as worlding.
Speakers:
Nicholas de Villiers
(University of North Florida)
Dolleen Manning
(Queen’s University)
Moderator:
Alanna Thain
(McGill University)
About the speakers:
Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and Film at the University of North Florida. He was a visiting scholar at National Central University in Taiwan at the Center for the Study of Sexualities (2017). His most recent books are Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (2017), and Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (2022), both from the University of Minnesota Press.
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation. She is a Queen’s University National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge and Culture (ALKC) in the Department of Philosophy. Manning has wide-ranging interests in Anishinaabe ontology, critical theory, phenomenology, art, and investigating questions of Indigenous imaging practices, mnidoo interrelationality, epistemological sovereignty, and the debilitating impact of settler colonial logics.
13/
DISPLACED SLEEP
Register on Eventbrite
or JOIN US IN PERSON!
Thursday, March 23, 2023
4pm–5:30pm EST (Zoom +
in person in Montreal at the Redpath Museum Auditorium, McGill University)
This salon considers the provocations of sleep out of place through its demands on a sociable sense of care, and the social, artistic and architectural choreographies that welcome or repel bodies at rest. Jean Ma (Film and Media Studies, Stanford University) will discuss the work of siting sleep in art practices and the spaces of art exhibition and performance, with a special attention to House/Full of Blackwomen, the work of Amara Tabor-Smith and Ellen Sebastian Chang (guests of our February 2022 Sleep Salon). Cara Chellew (Urban Planning, McGill) will discuss her research into hostile architecture and design for displacement, in dialogue with the need for rest and sleep of the unhoused. Moderated by Will Straw of McGill University.
Speakers:
Jean Ma
(Stanford University)
Cara Chellew
(McGill University)
Moderator:
Will Straw
(McGill University)
About the speakers:
Jean Ma is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her new book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is available as an open-source digital edition.
Cara Chellew is working on her PhD in Urban Planning, Policy & Design at McGill University in Montreal. She received her Masters in Environmental Studies (Planning) at York University in Toronto and is the founder of the Defensive Urban Design Research Network.
14/
SLEEPING IN TIME
Thursday, April 27, 2023
11am–12:30pm EST (Zoom)
Sleep is so often a matter of time: it is too short, too long, fragmented, happening at the wrong time, out of sync. Sleep is also a phenomenon of the times, with certain mores relating to the structure or material environment of sleep changing over time. This Salon opens up the many possibilities that a questioning of time and temporality have on our understanding of sleep as a culturally-and sociallty- variable lived experience. Paul Huebener’s (English, Athabasca University) political argument places sleep in larger cultural narratives of time as a form of power. Sasha Handley (History, University of Manchester) turns to the habits and beliefs of early modern England to consider what it means to sleep well. By taking on these abstract and concrete manifestations of sleeping in time, we conclude the Sleep Salon series with a reflection on what makes sleep today, in the time and temporalities of the now.
Speakers:
Paul Huebener
(Athabasca University)
Sasha Handley
(University of Manchester)
Moderator:
Marianne Cloutier
Art Historian and Curator, Montréal
About the speakers:
Paul Huebener is an Associate Professor of English at Athabasca University. His latest book, Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis (University of Regina Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Alanna Bondar Prize for the Environmental Humanities and the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Creative Writing. His previous book, Timing Canada, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. He is currently studying cultural representations of sleep in Canada, and his next book aims to help readers develop a critical literacy of sleep in a restless world.
Sasha Handley is a Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. She specialises in early modern social and cultural history in the British Isles, with a particular interest in histories of everyday healthcare, material culture, supernatural belief, and the history of emotions. She is the author of Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale UP, 2016), and is the Director of the Wellcome Trust-funded Sleeping Well in Early Modern England project. Follow her on Twitter.
FALL 2022
10/
QUANTIFIED SLEEP
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
11am–12:30pm EST (Zoom)
In an effort to improve our sleep, we’ve turned to digital assistants. But apps that help us in our fall to sleep or that monitor our body’s performance have become problematic companions in our efforts to rest. New technological interfaces are also entering sleep itself, aiming to enhance mechanisms dependent on sleep and dreams, such as memory consolidation or creativity. In this salon, we discuss and question new technologies that read, quantify, and optimize the dormant body.
Speakers:
Adam Haar Horowitz
(MIT)
Anna Nolde Nagele
(Queen Mary University)
Moderator:
Aleks Kaminska
(Communication, Université de Montréal)
About the speakers:
Adam Haar Horowitz focuses on cognitive science, with a particular focus on sleep and dreams. He is interested in how brain science can expand to interact with art, technology and policy. Adam recently graduated with his PhD from MIT, where he worked on teams building devices for tracking sleep and guiding dream content.
Anna Nolde Nagele is a design researcher, creative technologist and publisher. She is a PhD Candidate in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London, Associate Lecturer in Design Management at the London College of Communication and Founding Editor of The Posthumanist magazine. Her current research analyses the effects and affects of wearable sleep-trackers on user subjectivities, culture and environment through a critical posthumanist lense, using discourse analysis and autoethnography.
11/
THE POLITICS OF SLEEP
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
10am–11:30am EST (Zoom)
What space does sleep occupy in a politics of experience? Often conceived as a retreat from the social and communal, how is sleep becoming increasingly a space for a more expansive sense of the work of the political beyond the question of “rights”? In this sleep salon, we consider sleep as a site of politics in dialogue with feminism, violence, desire, memory and exhaustion. Cressida Heyes, author of Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke UP, joins us from the University of Alberta to discuss her new project, “Sex is the New Sleep” and the epistemological demands of the “unlived” experience of sleep. Artist Saodat Ismailova, who works between Taskkent and Paris, will discuss the place of sleep as retreat and engagement in her work as part of a generation of post-Soviet artists from Central Asia. Across film and installation in works such as Zukhra (2013) and Chillahona (2022), the resting body of women creates not a withdrawal from the political, but its expansion through time, space and affect.
Speakers:
Cressida Heyes
(University of Alberta)
Saodat Ismailova
(Artist and Filmmaker)
Moderator:
Alanna Thain
(English, McGill University)
About the speakers:
Cressida J. Heyes is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and also holds a Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada. They are the author of three monographs, most recently Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, published in 2020 by Duke University Press, and winner of the David Easton Award from the American Political Science Association. They are currently working on a SSHRC-funded book tentatively called Sleep is the New Sex, which will be the first feminist philosophy of sleep. One piece of that project has just appeared in the journal Critical Inquiry: “Reading Advice to Parents on Children’s Sleep: The Political Psychology of a Self-Help Genre.”
Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute in Uzbekistan and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. Her films and video installations were presented in Biennale of Venice, Berlinale IFF, Rotterdam IFF, CPH DOX etc. Works of Saodat Ismailova are in collection of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and The Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2022 Ismailova participated in the 59th Biennale of Venice’s main exhibition “Milk of Dream” and presented new work and Davra research group at documenta fifteen, as a lumpung artist. Ismailova received the Eye Art and Film Prize in 2022.
WINTER 2022
05/
Sleep and Labour
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
12pm–1:30pm EST (Zoom)
The rise of the modern, industrial workday also put sleep “on the clock.” As an optimizable activity of rest and recovery, sleep has arguably become as much a part of our work lives as work itself. This salon explores sleep as an experimental (and monetizable) zone of performance enhancement and bodily entrainment, considering the seemingly extreme cases of professional athletes and hospital shift workers to reveal the tensions we all experience between the social and biological demands of work and rest.
Speakers:
Sarah Barnes
(Cape Breton University)
Debra Skene
(University of Surrey)
Moderator:
Alanna Thain
(English, McGill University)
About the speakers:
Sarah Barnes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Experiential Studies in Community and Sport at Cape Breton University. A former athlete herself, Barnes has published on the regulation of sleep in professional athletics (the NBA and NFL), exploring race, technology and the commodification of rest.
Debra Skene is a chronobiologist and Professor of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Surrey. She studies circadian rhythm sleep disorders, as experienced by blind people, shift workers and aging individuals. Her research has pioneered the use of melatonin and light exposure to ameliorate the negative effects of shift work and circadian rhythm sleep disorders
06/
Performing Sleep
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
11am–12:30pm EST (Zoom)
Sleep is usually associated with personal environments and the literal and metaphorical withdrawal from the outside world; so the spectacle of sleeping in public can have powerful aesthetic and political effects. In this Salon we hear from artists who have created works around the performance of sleep and who seek to (re)claim the right to rest and care for the self by staging sleep publicly. These artists remind us of sleep’s linkages between (in)visibility and vulnerability in marginalized and at-risk communities.
Speakers:
Amara Tabor-Smith
(Stanford University)
Ellen Sebastian Chang
(Director, Producer, Educator)
Jasmeen Patheja
(Artist)
Moderator:
Dayna McLeod
(Artist-in-Residence)
About the speakers:
Amara Tabor-Smith is an Oakland based choreographer/performance maker and currently Artist in Residence at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Ellen Sebastian Chang is an accomplished theater director, producer and arts educator from the Bay Area. Among their many collaborations is House/Full of Blackwomen, which weaves themes of rest, care, sleep and dreams into an elaborate series of site-specific performances.
Jasmeen Patheja is a Bangalore-based artist, social entrepreneur and public speaker whose work seeks to end sexual and gender-based violence. As founder of the art/advocacy initiative Blank Noise, one of Patheja’s on-going projects is “Meet to Sleep,” which enables women to affirm their right to be defenceless by sleeping collectively in public parks.
07/
SOUND AND SLEEP
RESCHEDULED!
Friday, May 6, 2022
12pm–1:30pm EST (Zoom)
Falling asleep would seem to be opposite of being a good listener. Yet our guests at Salon 7 join an unlikely circle of composers and musicians who have written and performed music for/with sleeping audiences. Salon 7 undoes the associations of sleeping and listening to notions of passivity, and attends to sleep’s neuroarchitecture and non-conscious modes of experience for ways of rethinking musical form and the politics of reception.
Speakers:
Gascia Ouzounian
(Oxford University)
Mendi + Keith Obadike
(Pratt Institute + William Paterson University)
Moderator:
Devon Bate
(Concordia University)
About the speakers:
Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at Oxford University, co-director of the research network Recomposing the City, and PI on SONCITIES, a research initiative at the intersection of sound, urbanism and critical spatial practices. As a composer, she has written works for overnight performance that convert the real-time EEG data of sleeping performers into music for sleeping/waking audiences.
Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature, with a catalogue of works ranging from internet operas to poetry books to large-scale sound installations. Their recent 8-hour piece, lull, a sleep temple, which was performed as a livestream event during the pandemic, is meant to accompany sleep.
08/
WRITING SLEEP
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
12pm–1:30pm EST (Zoom)
To transform sleep into an object of research or even a topic of conversation has always required writing. From the “writing” of the most advanced EEG in the sleep laboratory to the keeping of a humble dream journal, writing allows us to learn from others’ experience of sleep and to accumulate fine-grained knowledge of sleep’s social significance. Salon 8 juxtaposes literary-critical explorations of sleep in contemporary fiction with the awareness- and empathy-building practices of life writing about sleep and sleep disorders.
Speakers:
Diletta de Cristofaro
(Politecnico di Milano / Northumbria University)
Julie Flygare
(Project Sleep)
Moderator:
Aleks Kaminska
(Communication, Université de Montréal)
About the speakers:
Diletta de Cristofaro is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and a Visiting Research Fellow at Northumbria University (UK). As a literary scholar, she has published on the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, and her current project examines the notion of sleep crisis in contemporary literary and cultural contexts.
Julie Flygare (JD) is President and CEO of Project Sleep, where she leads the organization’s patient-driven advocacy, awareness, and education programs. Her book Wide Awake and Dreaming: A Memoir of Narcolepsy, uses life writing to build knowledge and empathy about sleep and sleep disorders.
09/
THE STUFF OF SLEEP
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
4:30pm–6pm EST (Zoom)
The cliché that we spend a third of our lives sleeping has been taken up ambiguously by designers and architects. Most of our built environments are designed to facilitate our waking/working lives. Sleeping, along with resting, (day)dreaming and idling, are thus often part of a design and spatial practice interested optimizing environments for extractive neoliberal productivity and creativity. Salon 9 plays asks how we might design and build for sleep and a privileging of rest and care in the midst of a 24/7 worker/consumer culture.
Speakers:
Tega Brain
(New York University)
Sam Lavigne
(University of Texas at Austin)
New Circadia
Natalie Fizer (Parsons New School) + Richard Sommer (University of Toronto)
Moderator:
Erandy Vergara
(Curator and Postdoctoral Fellow)
About the speakers:
Tega Brain (Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University) is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure. Sam Lavigne (Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin) is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. Their collaboration on Perfect Sleep plays with self-tracking apps and furniture design, linking sleep to climate change, Silicon Valley and The Magic Mountain.
New Circadia is a collaboration between Richard Sommer (Professor of Architecture, University of Toronto), and Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson of the design team Pillow Culture. Their recent co-curated exhibition Adventures in Mental Spelunking was inspired by Nathaniel Kleitman’s sleep experiments in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky to rethink the roles of daydreaming, sleep, and repose in contemporary design and architecture.
FALL 2021
01/
THE SOCIAL
LIVES OF SLEEP
September 29, 2021 4:30pm–6pm
How and why should we conceive of sleep in social terms? Sleep appears to be a way that the body leaves behind the social world for an inner and highly individualized landscape. Yet much sleep research has also attended to the ways sleep reinforces the social, political, and environmental forces that govern our waking lives. Here we invite two distinguished researchers to share how their research approaches the social and collective dimensions of a seemingly singular experience. How might we begin to think the sociability of sleep?
Speakers:
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
(Anthropology, Binghamton University)
Carmela Alcántara
(Social Work, Columbia University)
Moderator:
Alanna Thain
(English, McGill University)
About the speakers:
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His book The Slumbering Masses: Sleep Medicine, and Modern American Life uses ethnographic and archival materials to explore the history of sleep and sleeplessness in 20th century American life against the backdrops of modern medicine and industrial capitalism.
Carmela Alcántara is Associate Professor of Social Work and Associate Dean for Doctoral Education at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, where she also directs the Sleep, Mind and Health Research Program. Her work, which integrates psychology, social work, public health and medicine, seeks to advance health equity by understanding how discrimination and other stressors affect sleep and mental health.
02/
The History (of the future) of sleep
October 13, 2021 4:30pm–6pm
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?
Speakers:
Kenton Kroker
(Social Science, York University)
Benjamin Reiss
(English, Emory University)
Moderator:
Josh Dittrich
(Communication, Université de Montréal)
About the speakers:
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.
03/
TRAUMATIC
SLEEP
November 17, 2021 4:30pm–6pm
How does the sleep of individuals and populations register traumatic experiences and events, from war to natural disasters? How has sleep served to shape our understanding, treatment and experience of trauma? For our featured speakers, the question remains how sleep might also serve as an expression of resilience and resistance to the traumas it enfolds.
Speakers:
Franny Nudelman
(English, Carleton University)
Judite Blanc
(Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami)
Moderator:
Alanna Thain
(English, McGill University)
About the speakers:
Franny Nudelman is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, focusing on war in 19th and 20th century US culture. Her recent book Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military looks critically at military-scientific interventions into the troubled sleep of US combat veterans, as well the efforts of a group of Vietnam veterans to transform sleep into a form of antiwar protest.
Judite Blanc is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami, having just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University School of Medicine’s Center for Healthful Behavioral Change. Her research examines the impact of traumatic and chronic stress on sleep and health outcomes, tackling racial/ethnic and gender disparities locally, nationally, and globally.
04/
CONTROLLING
DREAMS
December 8, 2021 4:30pm–6pm
Is it possible to control dreams through lucid dreaming states? Do dreams control us in the form of nightmares and other disturbances along the sleep/wake threshold? The act of dreaming and the research on dreams raise profound questions about the modes of agency, (inter)subjectivity, and experience that we inhabit through sleep. This Salon brings together dream researchers from the team at the Sociability of Sleep to discuss the philosophical and social questions raised at the margins of the dream world.
Speakers:
Anthony Zadra
(Psychology, Université de Montréal)
Elizaveta Solomonova
(Psychiatry, McGill University)
Moderator:
Claudia Picard-Deland
(Neuroscience, Université de Montréal)
About the speakers:
Antonio Zadra is Professor of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, where he is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. Having published extensively on dreams and parasomnias in both scientific and popular literature, he is most recently co-author of When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep.
Elizaveta Solomonova is a postdoctoral fellow in Psychiatry at McGill University and member of the Culture, Mind and Brain research group. Her interdisciplinary work considers consciousness and experience across wake-sleep states, with an interest in dreaming, empathy and intersubjectivity. Her recent work includes the impact of the COVID pandemic on sleep.