events
Hot Takes: Sleep Equity and Climate Change
March 17, 2023, 1pm EST
On Zoom (to sign up)
A special event on World Sleep Day featuring participants Jayson Porter, Kelton Minor, Arun Kumar, Benjamin Reiss, Devon Barnes and Sarah Barnes, and moderator Diletta De Cristofaro.
What are some of the ways in which we might approach the relationship between sleep and climate change? How do equity, sleep and climate activism relate to one another? These are the starting points for our special World Sleep Day event. In this roundtable discussion, our panellists will each speak from their own research perspectives on the relationship between sleep and the climate crisis. For this roundtable discussion, the panelists will each bring their research perspectives to speak on the relationship between sleep and the climate crisis, before the conversation is opened up to a wider exchange with the audience.
About the panelists:
✦ 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.
✦ Devon Bate is a a music producer and sound designer currently writing a Master’s thesis in Media Studies at Concordia University. 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.
✦ 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.
✦ Jayson Porter is the Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate in Environment and Society at Brown University. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, food systems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. Jayson is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and the forthcoming journal Plant Perspectives, a staff blogger for Black Perspectives, and an environmental specialist for Noria Research’s Mexico and Central America Program.
✦ Kelton Minor is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University. He applies tools from spatial data science and computational social science to study how humans adapt to planetary changes and climate hazards. He is currently working on several projects that bridge between Columbia’s Data Science Institute and Climate School to identify how meteorological and climatic stressors – including heatwaves and extreme precipitation – impact human behavior, sleep and wellbeing at scales ranging from communities to continents.
✦ Arun Kumar is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. He is a historian of modern India with an interest in social, economic, education and labour history. His work explores different facets of working-class life histories including their dreams, education, night-time histories, and childhood. He is currently working on his first book-project tentatively titled, The Silent Rebellion: Working-Class Dreams, Education and Welfare Capitalism.
Moderated by Diletta de Cristofaro who is currently a Wellcome Trust funded Research Fellow at Northumbria University. 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.