BOOK TALK | Paul Huebener- Restless in Sleep Country

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:

Paul Huebener will be giving a guest lecture, part of AUSUnights: Humanities Night hosted by the Athabasca University Students' Union.

His talk, titled "Reading Sleep in a Restless World," will explore how sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession, with up to half of the population in Canada reporting trouble sleeping. Consumer products like sleep trackers and scented pillow sprays imply that sleep loss is something for individuals to solve with quick tips and gadgets, but if we think about sleep as a cultural issue, we can recognize how sleep exposes competing agendas. This talk will explain how the humanities can challenge dominant visions of sleep, allowing us to see sleep as a place where values are formed and cultural debates are shaped.

This event is online and free, register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/ausunights-humanities-night-featuring-special-guest-dr-paul-huebener-tickets-1037257594387

Paul Huebener is professor of English at Athabasca University and the author of Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics of Time in Canadian Literary Culture.

about the book

Sleep, and the lack of it, is a public obsession and an enormous everyday quandary. Troubled sleep tends to be seen as an individual problem and personal responsibility, to be fixed by better habits and tracking gadgets, but the reality is more complicated. Sleep is a site of politics, culture, and power.

In Restless in Sleep Country Paul Huebener pulls back the covers on cultural representations of sleep to show how they are entangled with issues of colonialism, homelessness, consumer culture, technology and privacy, the exploitation of labour, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though it almost entirely evades direct experience, sleep is the subject of a variety of potent narratives, each of which can serve to clarify and shape its role in our lives. In Canada, cultural visions of slumber circulate through such diverse forms as mattress commercials, billboards, comic books, memoirs, experimental poetry, and bedtime story phone apps. By guiding us through this imaginative landscape, Huebener shows us how to develop a critical literacy of sleep.

Lying down and closing our eyes is an act that carries surprisingly high stakes, going beyond individual sleep troubles. Restless in Sleep Country illuminates the idea of sleep as a crucial site of inequity, struggle, and gratification.