[Commlist] CFP: I'll Sleep When I'm Undead: Sleep in 21st Century Horror Media (CORÉRISC/The Sociability of Sleep)

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

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I’ll Sleep When I’m Undead: Sleep in Contemporary Horror Media

July 2-7, 2023 in Montreal

DEADLINE: March 31, 2023



CORERISC: the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied 
Risk, and The Sociability of Sleep seek participants for a week-long 
writing workshop (July 2-7, 2023) centered on sleep in 21st century 
horror media. We aim to explore how horror media–from films to 
television to social media–responds to the conditions of sleep as a site 
of embodied risk today.


Sleep today is said to be in crisis. Sleep is under threat by our 24/7 
(Crary 2013) lifestyles; by demands of availability generated by social 
media, the internet and the always-on of media themselves; by the blue 
light of media screens, and the somatic reset of social media 
addictions; and by the crisis cycle of the contemporary news media. 
Sleep scientists are increasingly attending to longstanding inequities 
of access to “good sleep”, unevenly distributed across the fracture 
lines of social inclusion, and reflecting the environmental and cultural 
impact of insecure sleep conditions, including excess noise and 
illumination, rising temperatures under climate change, vulnerability to 
assault, an increasing demands to be available for work or care. These 
and other anxieties around sleep as a site of embodied risk are found 
across the spectrum of 21st century horror media.


Beyond dreams and nightmares, sleep itself has a complex history in 
horror media, in the remix of cinemas as a dream machine to a rich 
visual and aural language for altered states that blur the line between 
waking life and nightmare. While our focus is on 21st century media, we 
also seek work that puts today’s bad sleepers in dialogue with the past 
of sleep-horror media. Our premise is this: sleep is in essence a risky 
business. Sleep is often seen as generating precarious situations, and 
sleep itself is understood as a site of risk, vulnerability, and loss of 
control and agency. Sleep’s horror affects enervate the sharp edges of 
conventional horror, its eruptive distinctions between normal and 
deviant, raising complex questions of creepy agency, resistance, 
dispossession and vulnerability. Horror sleep media explores rest as a 
space of work, the site of the relentless extraction of the body’s 
capacities and biopolitical management, through monitoring and 
modulation, or in other cases the only territory in which the 
complexities and dangers of life today can be navigated as a new site of 
survival. Rather than naming a novel state of affairs, feminist, queer, 
and racialized sleep horror understands sleep not as a break in the 
fabric of reality that allows a horrific otherworldliness to emerge, but 
as the condition of the exhausting conditions of everyday life. Part of 
the horror in the contemporary wave of sleep horror media is that the 
waking/ dreaming binary is displaced by the grey zone of somatic 
capitalism, where even off-hours are occupied by apps that track, 
quantify and assess us while we sleep, for purposes not our own. How 
does 21st century media figure the dispossessive risks of sleep?


This weeklong writing workshop is a collaboration between the 
Sociability of Sleep interdisciplinary research-creation project and 
CORÉRISC as part of the series "Altered States: The Social Lives of 
Sleep". We seek four to five participants for a week-long writing 
workshop in Montreal in the context of the Sociability of Sleep’s summer 
exhibition/ InSomnolence/ (June 20-July 13, 2023). Participants will 
arrive on Sunday. Monday through Friday will be dedicated to 
collaborative and individual writing sessions, working towards the 
publication of an edited collection. As such, we plan to work both with 
individual chapters, and also to collectively shape the conversation 
about sleep in contemporary horror. Each day will include two short 
public talks from participants about their emergent research in sleep 
horror along with writing workshops and end-of-day check-ins. In keeping 
with the spirit of the workshop as a generative space, the week’s events 
will include several activities meant to inspire discussion. The 
Montreal Monstrum Society will co-host a public screening of a sleep 
horror film; participants will be encouraged to suggest material to 
screen and discuss; there will be a workshop on public scholarship on 
popular media; and there is the possibility of creating a podcast 
focusing on the sleep media that we watch and discuss together.


We seek proposals from workshop participants on topics such as:


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    Sleep and Genre (horror, noir, fantastique, dark fantasy)

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    Sleep and Media (cinema, television, short-form, social media)

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    Poetics of Sleep Horror (form, tone, atmosphere, style, mode)

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    Horror studies and sleep

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    Sleep and Experimental Horror

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    Sleep Horror as/and Ecology

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    Sleep Horror and Technology

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    Sleep Horror and Creep (climate creep, deep/geological time, scale)

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    Somnolent affects: sleep and spectators

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    (Sleep) media as a source of horror and risk

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    Too much, too little: sleep out of scale

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    Earlids and Eyelids: The Bleed of Sleep

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    Sleep Horror and Crisis, Disruption, Disorder

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    Lost sleep: insomnia and other absences  (as awareness, as
    problematic/symptom)

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    Sleep Horror and Labour

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    Retrovision: 21st century sleep horror frameworks recalling earlier
    media forms

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    Sleep and/in Horror Studies (concept, content, figuration)


Proposals should include:

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    a one-page description of your potential chapter: topic, approach
    and media  (300-400 words)

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    a short bio (150 words)


We welcome submissions from emerging scholars and contingent faculty, as 
well as from researchers from underrepresented perspectives in horror 
studies. There is funding available to support the participation of 
scholars, prioritizing those without access to institutional support. 
The workshop will take place in person in Montreal. If for you, travel 
to Montreal is not a possibility but you wish to take part in the 
_entire_ workshop, please indicate this in your application and we will 
find accommodation for remote participation.


Proposals can be sent to (corerisc /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(corerisc /at/ gmail.com)>, 
with the subject line “Undead Sleep Submissions”. Deadline is March 31, 
2023.  “I’ll Sleep When I’m Undead” is organized by CORÉRISC members 
Lynn Kozak, Alanna Thain and Kristopher Woofter, in collaboration with 
The Sociability of Sleep and is part of “Altered States: The Social 
Lives of Sleep”, with support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - 
Société et culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research 
Council of Canada.


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