activities

Graduate Colloquium 2021–2022

Somnambulations 1:

New Directions in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sleep

Friday, January 28, 2022, 9:30am–5pm EST

Streamed live on Zoom

Video recordings now available on our YouTube Channel

Programme

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: Aleks Kaminska (Communication, Université de Montréal)

Panel 2 (10:30am–11:20am) Sleep’s Creative Thresholds
YouTube recording

Cédric 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

YouTube recording

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
YouTube recording

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–5pm) 

YouTube recording

Bureau of Noncompetitive Research – Steeped In

 

Introduced by Josh Dittrich

Speaker bios

Bureau of Noncompetitive Research

Stacey Cann and Victoria Stanton are the Bureau of Noncompetitive Research. Multidisciplinary artists, researchers, writers, and educators, both are currently PhD students based in Montreal. With extensive performance, publication, and exhibition histories, the Bureau brings together their mutual interests in slow processes, dialogue, and collaboration.

Josianne Barrette-Moran

Josianne Barette-Moran is a bioethics student and medical ethics facilitator at McGill University. She is interested in narrative ethics, sleep advocacy and the social implications of circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders.

Devon Bate

Devon Bate is music producer and sound designer currently writing a Master’s thesis in Media Studies (Concordia University). He has produced Juno and Polaris Prize winning albums across genres, including Jeremy Dutcher’s Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018), and am a four-time Montreal English Theatre Awards nominee for Outstanding Composition and Sound Design. Beginning in a 2015 artist residency with the MUU Artists’ Association in Helsinki, he has been creating work that interrogates how culturally and technologically informed listening practices shape physical space, community, and identity. He is currently researching background noise and ambient audiovisual media on popular streaming platforms.

Stacey Cann

Stacey Cann is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and Ph.D. student in Art Education working in Montreal, Quebec. She writes about contemporary art with a particular focus on artist-run culture, media arts, performative practices, and socio-material approaches. Her artwork involves durational elements whose mundane nature borders on the absurd, and she is interested in how we present ourselves in our everyday lives.

Josh Dittrich

Josh Dittrich writes about sound, media and environment. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Geosonics that explores imaginative and technical attempts to listen to the earth in the context of new materialist and environmental media studies. His next project explores affinities between sleeping and listening, seeking to translate concepts like affect, rhythm and non-conscious cognition from sound and media studies toward the sociocultural study of sleep. He teaches courses in communications, cultural studies, and sound and media at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Sandra Huber

Sandra Huber is a PhD candidate in Humanities at Concordia University, where she focuses on the media of contemporary witchcraft. She is the author of Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014).

Cédric Kayser

Cédric Kayser holds a Ph.D. in French Literature after defending a dissertation on Proust and the limits of the body at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Marcello Vitali-Rosati. He studied French Literature and Philosophy in Europe and works as a consultant / scientific collaborator for the cognitive remediation center KitFocus in Montreal. His current research focuses on critical phenomenology and the glitch as a model for textual analysis. Aside from his academic life, he has pursued a musical career by composing for theatre, films and museum exhibitions.

Josie Roland Hodson

Josie Roland Hodson is a PhD student in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, where her interdisciplinary research focuses on Black diaspora aesthetics and notions of Black sociality. Previously, she has worked at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Most recently, her article “Rest Notes: On Black Sleep Aesthetics” appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of October. 

Kristie Serota

Kristie Serota is a PhD Candidate in Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and is completing a Collaborative Specialization in Bioethics through the Joint Centre for Bioethics. She has a Master’s degree in Applied Social Psychology from the University of Guelph. The sleeplessness project she presents in this colloquium is based on an article published in Art Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal. Her research interests include critical qualitative methods, poststructuralism, and creative analytic practices. She is an aspiring clinical ethicist and quilter.

Victoria Stanton

Considered a pioneer of transactional practices in Quebec, the overlapping threads of Victoria Stanton’s praxis – as an artist, researcher, curator, educator – place dialogue at the centre of her performative works. She has co-authored two books (Impure, Reinventing the Word, conundrum press, 2001, with Vincent Tinguely, and The 7th Sense/Le 7e sens, SAGAMIE édition d’art, 2017, with the TouVA collective), and presented performances, infiltrating/relational actions, exhibitions, and videos in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Cuba. In 2018, Stanton was a recipient of the PRIX POWERHOUSE, and is currently pursuing a research-creation PhD in Art Education at Concordia University exploring “Doing Nothing” as a creative vehicle in artistic process through examining the role of rest/pause/interval in both performance art contexts & everyday spaces like the classroom.

Ryan Staples

Ryan Staples is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in the Humanities at York University. His dissertation examines the relations between dreaming, psychological expertise, and liberal governmentality in the United States since the nineteenth century. He suspects the history of psychological discourse about dreaming can provide an “object lesson” in the mechanics of knowledge, power, and ethics in advanced liberal societies. His research shows how one of the most “intimate” and “private” modes of human experience has been conditioned by historical forces beyond the individual subject.”