The Sleepwalking project is designed as a continuation of the current research project „Sleep Knowledge. On the production of knowledge in sleep laboratories and via self-tracking“(01/2020-12/2023). This study uses the example of sleep to investigate how knowledge gains validity in varying contexts for experts and/or laypersons. In a cooperative effort between sociology and contemporary history, this project interlocks three sub-studies: (a) a contemporary historical analysis, (b) an ethnography of the sleep laboratory, and (c) an investigation of sleep tracking and sleep-related social media exchanges. The closely coordinated subprojects analyze the practices, technologies, and representations through which certain forms of sleep knowledge are attributed validity. In each case, the quantification and visualization of sleep knowledge has proven to be highly relevant: In both the historical and contemporary sleep laboratory as well as in sleep-tracking practices, the contingency of knowledge is reduced through numerical production and graphic representation, and the respective sleep problem is in turn disambiguated as a (medical) phenomenon. Thus, it is primarily biomedical forms of sleep knowledge produced by devices that gain validity. At the same time, however, institutionalized laboratory science is subject to uncertainties and voids that relate in particular to problems such as sleep-through and wake-up disorders, restless leg syndrome, and sleepwalking – that is, to liminal phenomena that arise between waking and sleeping, activity and passivity, which receive far less attention in the laboratory and are also more difficult to treat and account for than, for example, sleep apnea.
It is at this juncture that the proposed project comes in, scrutinizing the liminal phenomenon of sleepwalking to brush against the grain of previous findings on the production and validation of sleep knowledge. Sleepwalking largely eludes medical operationalization and exhibits a certain recalcitrance with respect to scientific-technical measurement as well as experimental designability. Thus, using sleepwalking as an example, we ask how, by whom, and in which arenas knowledge is generated when a central frame of reference – (natural) science – openly documents its limits in a knowledge society. Based on the subprojects that are already underway, we aim to conduct a) a contemporary historical analysis of court cases against sleepwalkers, b) an ethnographic study of investigations of sleepwalking in the laboratory, and c) an online ethnography of sleepwalking. We thereby assume that sleepwalking as a liminal state is particularly well suited to investigating uncertainties in sleep knowledge as well as demonstrating the validity claims of alternative knowledge orders.
