Description
This paper provides a panoramic and pluralist diagnosis of how sleep dynamics, experiences, practices, and meanings interpenetrate political life and its study. We develop these reflections through three main sections. A first section on ‘embodied sleep’ summarizes sleep science and medical accounts of the physiological aspects of sleep as a common, basic need of highly variable quantity and quality. Here we especially highlight the foreign relations impacts of embodied sleep. The section thereafter outlines sleeping spaces and practices as sites of politics, especially governance, discipline, and contestation. A penultimate section links these themes to sleep’s impact on the emergence of the modern Self, initially as a change in consciousness but more recently as an explicit vector of radicalization. We conclude with some suggestions on further research opportunities that arise in light of these reflections.
