Dissertation Research: Sleep and the Biopolitics of Everyday Life

科学与社会科学、工程与技术社会研究项目的论文改进资助是一项关于美国社会睡眠和睡眠医学的人种学研究，特别关注睡眠在不同制度背景下的不同定义方式，包括科研中心、医院、支持团体和民间社会，包括学校和公司工作场所，其中睡眠是一个政策问题。为了将这些理解置于历史的位置，档案研究将对美国社会时间制度的发展进行研究，特别关注国家的作用，农村和城市的二分法，以及在塑造时间的文化常态中感知到的时间自然性。本研究通过展示当代生物政治制度如何依赖于日益被文化缓和的生物学建设，挑战了对生物政治的主流解释。这一过程依赖于生物和自然的话语生产，因为它们是不可避免的，与文化相反，文化被理解为灵活的。迄今为止，还没有关于生物学及其与必然性的关系的理论，或者更普遍的时间制度。睡眠为理解必然性和灵活性在当代美国生命政治中的作用提供了一个窗口。此外，在Thomas Kuhn的科学范式理论的基础上，本研究提供了对相互竞争的科学-医学范式之间关系的民族志理解，因为当代睡眠医学目前是相互竞争的医学专业领域（特别是肺医学和神经医学）之间争论的场所。最后，这项拟议的研究是第一次对时间在美国文化和政治中的作用进行持续的历史分析，特别是在医院、工作场所、学校和家庭的制度背景下。美国国家睡眠基金会（National Sleep Foundation）估计，40%的美国人睡眠不足，75%的美国人报告说，每周有几个晚上或更长时间出现睡眠障碍症状。睡眠不足已被证明会导致抑郁、精神敏锐度下降和身体健康状况不佳。此外，睡眠临床医生声称，一些被诊断为注意力缺陷障碍的病例被误诊为患有睡眠剥夺的患者。睡眠医学还表明，青少年比青春期前的儿童需要更多的睡眠，尽管初中和高中传统上比小学更早开始，导致初中和高中学生普遍睡眠不足，这可能会通过改变学校开始时间来改善。同样，尽管许多企业都有关于弹性工作时间的积极政策，但很少有员工利用这些政策，这导致最近引入了工作场所午睡政策。科技允许人类通过电灯延长一天的时间来改变他们的生活；没有必要遵守目前在学校和工作场所的时间使用方式，因为它导致近一半的美国人睡眠不足。通过了解对规范时间使用的文化影响，美国社会的机构可以调整时间的使用，以有利于工人和学生的健康，从而在生物学的要求和技术提供的可能性之间找到平衡。

This Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Science and Society's Program in the Social Studies of Science, Engineering and Technology is an ethnographic study of sleep and sleep medicine in American society, with particular focus on the ways in which sleep is variously defined within different institutional contexts, including scientific research centers, hospitals, support groups, and civil society, including schools and corporate workplaces where sleep is a policy concern. In order to situate these understandings historically, archival research will be conducted on the development of temporal regimes in American society with special attention being paid to the role of the state, rural and urban dichotomies, and the perceived naturalness of time in shaping culturally normaluses of time. This study challenges dominant interpretations of biopolitics by showing how contemporary biopolitical regimes depend on the construction of biology as increasingly mitigated by culture. This process depends on the discursive production of biology and nature as being inevitable and opposed to culture, which is understood as being flexible. To date, there have been no theorizations of biology and its relation to inevitability, or temporal regimes more generally. Sleep provides a window through which to understand the role of inevitability and flexibility in contemporary American biopolitics. Moreover, building on Thomas Kuhn's theorization of scientific paradigms, this study provides an ethnographic understanding of the relationship between competing scientific-medical paradigms, as contemporary sleep medicine is currently a site of contestation between competing fields of medical specialty, specifically pulmonary and neurological medicine. Finally, the proposed research is the first sustained historical analysis of the role of time in American culture and politics, specifically within the institutional contexts of the hospital, workplace, school and family. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that 40% of Americans are sleep deprived, with 75% of Americans reporting suffering from sleep disorder symptoms a few nights a week or more. Sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to depression, decreased mental acuity and poor physical health. Additionally, some cases of attention deficit disorder diagnoses are claimed by sleep clinicians to be misdiagnosed patients suffering from sleep deprivation. Sleep medicine also indicates that adolescents require more sleep than prepubescent children, although middle and high schools traditionally begin earlier than elementary schools, leading to rampant sleep deprivation in middle and high school students, which may be ameliorated by the alteration of school start times. Similarly, although many businesses have positive policies regarding flextime very few employees take advantage of such, which has led recently to the introduction of workplace napping policies. Technology allows human beings to modify their days by lengthening them with electric light; there is no need to abide by the current use of time in the school and workplace when it results in sleep deprivation for almost half of Americans. By understanding the cultural influences on normative time use, institutions within American society may be empowered to adjust their uses of time in order to benefit the health of workers and students and thereby find a balance between the demands of biology and the possibilities provided by technology.