Somatosphere is a fabulous collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.
Over the last week they have published a series of posts on “The Longing for Sleep” introduced as follows:
Sleep has been in the news for the past decade or so as a matter of growing concern. Along with this popular, medical and scientific attention, social scientists have been increasingly interested in sleep as an object or process of study. The first major sociological book published on sleep was Simon Williams’ Sleep and Society (Routledge, 2005), after which a number of other monographs and edited collections followed, including Williams’ latest book on The Politics of Sleep (Palgrave, 2011). In 2012, Matthew Wolf-Meyer published the first anthropological study of sleep in the United States, The Slumbering Masses (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). In the conversation that follows Williams and Wolf-Meyer assess the field of social studies of sleep, discuss their commonalities and differences, and think about the future of sleep and its place in the social sciences and humanities.
The conversation is appearing in three posts for the purpose of comments and responses. (Read Part 1 and Part 2). The entire interview is also available here as a pdf.
Read more here. And have a restful weekend.