I’m delighted to be giving a keynote at “Somnambulations 2: Critical Approaches to Sleep” in Montreal (26-27 June). The conference is part of The Sociability of Sleep Research-Creation Project. I’ll be talking about “The Cultural Meanings of Insomnia”.
Here’s a brief abstract:
In many analyses, the age of globalization is also the age of a sleep crisis—or societal insomnia—largely attributed to the 24/7 society. Through the exploration of a range of texts—memoirs, fictions, self-help manuals, art installations, and TV series—this talk explores the cultural meanings of insomnia in the age of globalization and, in so doing, why this period is also widely believed to be the age of societal insomnia. In the talk, insomnia will emerge as a site where contradictory social imperatives that articulate sleep as, at once, a waste of time and essential to wellbeing merge with a range of individual and collective anxieties about life in the 24/7 globalized world, from concerns about precarity and the nature of work to concerns about new technologies and the environment.