Sleep and Sleeplessness in Germany – Rethinking Agency, Knowledge, and Experience through Sleep
 

Sleep research is booming. With the help of apps and sleep laboratories, sleep seems to have become measurable. New pharmaceuticals and medical technologies promise to give us control over sleep. But how do these new worlds of knowledge affect the experience of sleep, especially for those who yearn for good sleep but fail to achieve it? The project draws attention to the dilemmas of sleep knowledge production. What is the relationship between subjectively experienced and objectively measured sleep? What happens to sleep at the interface of human and machine? And how do doctors, scientists, pharma/tech salespeople and patients narrate and navigate the widely pronounced “sleep crisis” amidst complex and often conflicting considerations of care, profit, prestige, and health politics?

My current research project is situated at the intersections between psychological and medical anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and the interdisciplinary field of sleep science. I am interested in how knowledge on sleep, and disordered sleep in particular, is produced (in sleep labs for instance), how this knowledge is applied in diagnosis and therapy, and how it is related to subjective experiences of sleep and sleeplessness. On the one hand the project looks at the relationship between knowledge and experience: How is sleep – by definition something we don’t have conscious access to – measured, recorded, and evaluated? And how do such “objective” measurements relate to how people subjectively experience and think of their sleep? On the other hand, I am interested in agency: How do people try to influence and induce sleep? How do they try to fix it? And, more theoretically, how can we rethink anthropological perspectives on agency through sleep?

The first phase of the fieldwork took place in a German sleep lab dedicated to diagnosis and treatment. Through participant observation, I studied the “interactions” between the technical instruments and the patients, the ways sleep and the sleeping subject are cared for, arranged, measured and evaluated, and the resulting “techno-intimate” atmosphere at the lab. I have also conducted interviews, both with medical professionals specializing in sleep as well as with patients suffering from disordered sleep (insomnia, in particular). Drawing on these interviews and fieldwork conducted at medical conferences, I am currently analysing how different actors (doctors, scientists, pharma/tech salespeople, and patients) produce and navigate sleep knowledge and sleep care within the German medical economy.