Sleep and its meanings sociocultural investigations from critical sleep studies edited by Diletta De Cristofaro

Format:

Book

Contributor:

De Cristofaro, Diletta, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sleeping customs.

Sleep--Social aspects.

Sleep.

Sleep--Psychological aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press [2026]

Summary:

"A wide-ranging collection exploring the many meanings of sleep, within the context of the humanities and social sciences. Sleep has been an object of specialized medical research for more than a century now, yet it is only in the twenty-first century that sleep has become a significant focus across the humanities and social sciences, a growing interest that has been termed critical sleep studies. Featuring essays by leading international scholars, Sleep and Its Meanings is the first collection devoted to this multidisciplinary field. These essays probe the social, cultural, political, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic meanings of sleep. For it is only by considering these meanings that we can begin to understand sleep not just as a biological fact of life but as profoundly intertwined with the world the sleeper inhabits. The book showcases some of the diverse disciplines that make up critical sleep studies, including both the ones that have been prominent in the field’s development from the outset—sociology, anthropology, history—and those that have turned to sleep only more recently and have therefore been so far underrepresented—literary and cultural studies, as well as studies of arts, design, and media"-- MIT Press Direct

Contents:

The problem of sleep : an introduction to critical sleep studies / Diletta De Cristofaro

Watching and waking : between critical attention studies and critical sleep studies / Alice Bennett

Toward a politics of drift : curating sleep for critical times / Alanna Thain and Aleksandra Kaminska

A genealogy of sleep : a (crip) critique of cultural conceptions of sleep / Nicole Eugene

Sleeping Beauty and sleep science : physiology and myth-making in nineteenth-century and contemporary somnocultures / Martin Willis

The sociology of sleep : a Bourdieusian approach / Simon J. Williams

“This is how we sleep” : young children’s views on how “biologically normal” sleep is managed in their homes / Lexie Scherer

Troubled sleep in tsunami evacuation shelters in Yamada, Japan, 2011 / Brigitte Steger

Sleeping in the Peruvian Andes and the suburbs of Marseille : an anthropological reflection on sleep as a historical and social experience / Arianna Cecconi

Captive sleep : urban space and the politics of rest in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro / Amy Chazkel

Revelations through rest : sleep and the psyche of Mumbai / Namita Vijay Dharia

Beds as symbols of human identity : a varied history of power / Simona Chiodo and Imma Forino

Sleep consistency : affordances of sleep-tracking technologies / Nico Wettmann and Nicole Zillien

The subjectivities of wearable sleep trackers : a critical posthumanist discourse analysis / Anna Nolda Nagele

Touching sleep : immersed process, dispersed object, situated vulnerability / Stuart Murray, Christophe de Bezenac, and Dave Lynch

Sleep’s three faces : vulnerability, infrastructure, variability / Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (MIT Press Direct, viewed June 3, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version Sleep and its meanings

ISBN:

9780262052320

0262052326

9780262052313

0262052318

OCLC:

1592869978

Access Restriction:

Some versions Open access versions available from some providers open access