Making Sleep: New Insights for a New Public Health?
7 - 8 July 2021
Whilst sleep is clearly important for health and wellbeing, current public
health responses often simply advise people to sleep more. For example, it has
been suggested that the UK Government are "planning to issue guidance on how
much sleep people should be getting every night" (BBC News, 2019). According
to a leaked Department of Health & Social Care (2019) Green paper, the
Government will review the evidence on sleep and health with the view to
informing the case for guidance on hours of sleep. This resonates with calls
from the UK Royal Society for Public Health, for a 'slumber number' to be
published which makes it easier for individuals to know how much they should
be sleeping (Royal Society for Public Health, 2018). The United States
National Sleep Foundation has also recently issued age-specific sleep duration
recommendations (Hirshkowitz et al., 2015). These approaches appear limited.
For one, sleep is liminal and beyond the limits of voluntary agency. For
another, sleep is linked to social position. Grandner (2017), for example,
highlights how race, ethnicity, culture, employment, neighbourhood,
socioeconomic status, marriage and the family environment all impact on an
individual's sleep. Moving forward requires a fundamentally different
approach. Previous discussions of sleep and public health have tended to be
siloed within disciplinary domains, exacerbating uncertainties and limiting
meaningful dialogue.
The current landscape is also complex and rapidly changing - with sleep
presently caught in a perfect storm of anxiety, technological innovation and
uncertainty. Digital technologies, for example, now prioritise a form of
'algorithmic' sleep which does not seem to fit easily into historical notions
of expertise or the established dualism of 'subjective' and 'objective' sleep.
These shifts and developments transcend disciplinary specific voices and
sociologists, sleep scientists, practitioners, public health specialists all
need to come together and critically reflect. The proposed workshop therefore
brings together scholars and practitioners from a range of different
disciplines to debate and discuss how we might move beyond traditional
confines and work towards a new national sleep strategy.
Bringing together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines, the
workshop will:
(i) Map the complexity of sleep across different domains (such as in the
clinic, through wearable technologies art, literature and public health).
(ii) Use this as an evidence base to explore new conceptual frames and revisit
fundamental questions - such as what is sleep, how should we sleep, how should
we measure sleep?
(iii) Explore the implications therein for a new public health for sleep
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Louise Berger, Royal Surrey County
Hospital
Derk-Jan Dijk, University of
Surrey
Jason Ellis,
Northumbria University
Christine Hine, University of
Surrey
Jeff Mann, SleepJunkies
Robert Meadows, University of
Surrey
Michael Grandner, University of
Arizona
Diletta De
Cristofaro, Northumbria University
Martyn Pickersgill,
University of Edinburgh
Other speaker details to be released nearer the time.
EVENT PROGRAMME
Day 1 - Mapping the complexity of sleep across different domains [09:30 to
14:00 UTC+1]
Day 1 will include short talks on sleep across different domains - namely the
clinic, digital technology, online spaces, public health, art and literature.
Speakers will be invited to reflect on the messiness of sleep and highlight
any challenges around normativity, interventions and expertise. The day will
end with themed breakout rooms.
Day 2 - Responding to the complexity of sleep [14:30 to 17:30 UTC+1]
Day 2 begins with keynote talks introducing different conceptual frames and
ways to think about the complexities of sleep. Multidisciplinary panels will
then be invited to reflect on future agendas - for both our understandings of
sleep and public health responses.
Visit https://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/event/making-sleep/ for free registration.
Prof Christine Hine
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey GU2 7NX
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