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Decelerative media and technologies of sleep in the everyday

ToSleep

ToSleep explores the mediation of sleep in ordinary people’s everyday (night)lives and how the entanglements of sleep and technology transform how sleep is known, done, acted upon, and valued. The project is funded by The Carlsberg Foundation and runs from 2025-2028.

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About the project

At a time when acceleration, constant connectivity, and time pressure are seen as defining features of contemporary society, ToSleep takes a different approach and explores media in relation to sleep with a specific focus on media’s decelerative potential.

Rather than assuming that media and sleep are fundamentally at odds, the project examines the ambivalent and sometimes paradoxical roles that digital technologies, platforms, and media habits play - and have played historically - in the everyday practices surrounding sleep.

The project approaches sleep as a mediated, socio-material, and historically situated practice: Sleep is not simply as a biological necessity, but also something that is regulated, moralised, optimised, and increasingly datafied. At the same time users’ everyday negotiations with sleep through digital technologies complicate dominant narratives of productivity and optimisation as they also contain moments of care, resistance, ambivalence, and disconnection.

Through qualitative analyses of newspaper archive material, apps and SoMe content in combination with workshops, interviews and media diaries ToSleep unpacks the mediation of sleep and media’s role in producing what sleep is, what counts as “good” or “bad” sleep, and how sleepers understand themselves and their bodies.

ToSleep offers a timely and humanistic account of sleep as a site where media, technology, health, and everyday (night)life intersect. The project contributes to ongoing debates about digital disconnection, wellbeing, and temporal politics, while also engaging with broader societal discussions about sleep, rest, and the pressures of acceleration.

Ultimately, ToSleep aims to inform future policy, research and public conversations about how we might create healthier, more sustainable conditions for rest in a media- and data saturated world.

Organisation of ToSleep

ToSleep is organised around three interconnected work packages that together examine sleep across everyday practices and rhythms, technological affordances, and historical contexts:

  • This work package focuses on how people do sleep in everyday life and how different sleep technologies and rituals are interwoven in pre-sleep practices and the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Based on workshops, interviews and media diaries with 18+ year old Danes, WP1 explores assemblages of analogue and digital pre-sleep technologies and their ”rest-making” capapcities. Associate professor Maja Klausen, principal investigator of ToSleep, is in charge ofWP1.

  • Postdoc. Yukun You examines how sleep is measured, visualised, and interpreted through commercial sleep-tracking technologies. Based on workshops, media diaries and interviews with people who track their sleep, this work package explores the datafication and gamification of sleep and how metrics shape ideals about sleep and how users engage with, question, or resist algorithmic assessments of their bodies. The analysis highlights the political and ethical implications of datafied sleep and sleep futures in relation to self-care, responsibility, and optimisation.

  • In the third workpackage Ph.d. student Sofie Exner Koch situates contemporary sleep practices in a longer cultural and historical perspective. Through analyses of e.g. Danish newspapers from 1920-1940 WP3 traces how sleep has always been culturally mediated and socially regulated, challenging ideas of “natural” or timeless sleep norms. The project situates contemporary and historic mediations of sleep within broader regimes of governance, responsibility, and moral judgement raising political questions about normativity, productivity, and the commodification of sleep.

Activities

ToSleep is participating in several events for Festival of Research on April 18, 2026, at SDU Odense: