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This book is open access under a CC BY license.
This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest's presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena.
The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.
List of contents
Introduction; Felicity Callard, Kimberley Staines, James Wilkes.- Part I: MINDS.- 1. Altered states: resting state and default mode as psychopathology; Ben Alderson-Day and Felicity Callard.- 2. The quest for quies mentis; Hilary Powell.-3.Writing and daydreaming; Hazel Morrison.- 4. Daydream archive; Felicity Callard.- 5.Descriptive Experience Sampling as a psychological method; Charles Fernyhough and Ben Alderson-Day.- 6.The Poetics of Descriptive Experience Sampling; Holly Pester and James Wilkes.- 7.The Rest Test: preliminary findings from a large-scale international survey on rest; Claudia Hammond and Gemma Lewis.-Part II: BODIES.- 8. From therapeutic relaxation to mindfulness in the twentieth century; Ayesha Nathoo.- 9. So even the tree has its yolk; James Wilkes.- 10. Cartographies of rest: the spectral envelope of vigilance; Josh Berson.- 11. Getting the measure of the restless city; Des Fitzgerald.- 12. Drawing attention: ways of knowing derived in the movement of the pencil; Tamarin Norwood.- 13. Songs of rest: an intervention in the complex genre of the lullaby; Holly Peste.- 14. Could insomnia be relieved with a YouTube video? The relaxation and calm of ASMR; Giulia Poerio;.- 15. Relief from a certain kind of personhood in ASMR role-play videos; Emma Bennett.-Part III: PRACTICES.- 16. R-E-S-T and composition: silence, breath and aah ... [gap] musical rest; Antonia Barnett-McIntosh.- 17. Metrics of unrest: building social and technical networks for Heathrow noise;Christian Nold.- 18.This is an experiment: capturing the everyday dynamics of collaboration in The Diary Room; Felicity Callard, Des Fitzgerald and Kimberley Staines.- 19. Greasing the wheels: invisible labour in interdisciplinary environments; Kimberley Staines and Harriet Martin.- 20.Rest denied, rest reclaimed; Lynne Friedli and Nina Garthwaite.- 21. Laziness: A literary-historical perspective;Michael Greaney.-22. Day of restlessness; Patrick Coyle.
Summary
This book is open access under a CC BY license.
This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest’s presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena.
The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.
Additional text
“This book … enables its readers to encounter or assemble a rich and compelling collage of rest as a multifaceted and many-threaded phenomenon, which may suggest new questions and modes of research. For those involved in or interested in interdisciplinary collaboration, the book serves as a open document of how a large interdisciplinary collaboration might be held together, both through the strategies of restlessness and openness, and through its reflexivity.” (Dr. Sarah Klein, Centre for Medical Humanities Durham University, centreformedicalhumanities.org, November, 2017)
Report
"This book ... enables its readers to encounter or assemble a rich and compelling collage of rest as a multifaceted and many-threaded phenomenon, which may suggest new questions and modes of research. For those involved in or interested in interdisciplinary collaboration, the book serves as a open document of how a large interdisciplinary collaboration might be held together, both through the strategies of restlessness and openness, and through its reflexivity." (Dr. Sarah Klein, Centre for Medical Humanities Durham University, centreformedicalhumanities.org, November, 2017)
