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Sleeping with Strangers - Techno-Intimacies and Side-Affects in a German Sleep Lab
Fremd Schlafen - Techno-Intimitäten und Neben-Affekte in einem deutschen Schlaflabor
[journal article]
Abstract This article explores the challenges of knowledge production in a sleep lab. Based on ethnographic research, and drawing on affect theory, I investigate the peculiar mix of cables and care, sensors and senses, "natural" sleep and technological tinkering, intimacy and strangeness that characterize ni... view more
This article explores the challenges of knowledge production in a sleep lab. Based on ethnographic research, and drawing on affect theory, I investigate the peculiar mix of cables and care, sensors and senses, "natural" sleep and technological tinkering, intimacy and strangeness that characterize nightly life at the lab. I discuss how the production of relevant knowledge and good therapeutic outcomes depends on the careful co-management of technologies, environments, bodies, personalities, and their various entanglements, which I capture by developing three analytical concepts: intimate space (to think about the sleep lab environment), technointimacy (to think about the haptic encounters between technology, bodies, and emotion), and side-affects (to think about the undesired effects of bodyminds on technology). Together, the three concepts bring out how patients' entanglements with sleep-related technologies and environments evoke intense affects and emotions which incessantly interfere with knowledge production and therapy. In order to bring about "good enough sleep" for "good enough knowledge," trade-offs between natural sleep and techno-medical interruptions abound. As every insomniac knows, sleep resists control. The sleep lab manifests this tension writ large.... view less
Keywords
sleep; laboratory; knowledge production; intimacy; medicine; technology
Classification
Philosophy of Science, Theory of Science, Methodology, Ethics of the Social Sciences
Sociology of Knowledge
Free Keywords
Sleep laboratory; affect theory; medical technology
Document language
English
Publication Year
2023
Page/Pages
p. 23-40
Journal
Historical Social Research, 48 (2023) 2
Issue topic
Sleep, Knowledge, Technology. Studies of the Sleep Lab, Sleep Tracking and Beyond
ISSN
0172-6404
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed