Table Of ContentThe Restless Compendium
Felicity Callard • Kimberley Staines • James Wilkes
Editors
The Restless
Compendium
Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest
and Its Opposites
Editors
Felicity Callard Kimberley Staines
Durham University, Durham Durham University, Durham
United Kingdom United Kingdom
James Wilkes
Durham University, Durham
United Kingdom
ISBN 978-3-319-45263-0 ISBN 978-3-319-45264-7 (ebook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951673
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F
oreword
I start this foreword with a deceptively simple question: What difference
might it make doing research in public? This was one of the key challenges
faced by the first inhabitants of Wellcome Collection’s Hub, located as
they have been in the capital of a thriving public venue. The brave and
brilliantly experimental Hubbub team have spent two years (and roughly
£1 million) living out one possible answer.
Four features of their model stand out: they have fixed on and then
refined an intriguing topic; selected and energetically mixed an eclec-
tic range of investigators; tested and refined effective ways of working
together; and finally, they have skilfully integrated modes of investigation
with others of dissemination. Interestingly, these are also core attributes
of the curatorial practices that Wellcome Collection has elaborated since
opening in 2007. It is not too surprising maybe that investigation-led pro-
gramming bears striking methodological resemblances to research con-
ducted with the public in mind.
Defined in their own carefully chosen words, Hubbub has been con-
cerned with the ‘dynamics of rest, noise and work’. We live in frantic times
when many of us measure our worth according to how busy we seem,
but we are simultaneously worried sick by the consequences. When is it
healthy to be turbulent or calm, noisy or still, and for whom? There are
urgent questions here, but luckily the topics to which Hubbub has chosen
to apply a cross-curricular mindset are also intrinsically fascinating: the
experience and psychological characteristics of mind wandering; people’s
movements across the city; and current practices of unemployment, which
can ironically turn into a form of exhausting busyness.
v
vi FOrEWOrD
One invention of our frantically busy era is the strapline: a snappy
phrase that people in a rush can catch on the move. Established a decade
ago, Wellcome Collection initially identified its essence in the juxtaposi-
tion of three common words: medicine, life and art. A decade of adventur-
ous exhibitions and events delving into this conceptual triangle has taught
us just how much more intriguing (not to mention easier) it is to start in
the middle (with life): considering, for example, twins rather than genet-
ics. Hubbub has also been, it seems, instinctively drawn to a topic infused
with common currency, which offers a handle that non-experts can grasp.
‘The opposites of rest’ is a provocative notion that can be approached
in many ways and that demands interstitial thinking: an idea not exclu-
sively owned by one discipline. Crucially, this has also turned out to be a
stranger proposition than it first appeared, revealing surprising unknowns
amongst what was already known.
Even the most compelling and approachable subject would remain
dormant without the right mix of disciplined adventurers ready to bring
it to life. In Hubbub’s case they arrived in the form of researchers from
across the campus, as well as artists, broadcasters and public engagement
professionals. A common denominator running through their inven-
tive investigations of sub-topics such as stress, noise, the voice, work and
sound has been the active integration of insights into subjective experi-
ences of medicine (often couched in terms of intensely personal meanings
understood from within) combined with more objective versions of the
human condition emerging from biomedical laboratories and statistical
analyses, where phenomena are explained from without.
Enthusiastic rhetoric that boosts interdisciplinary activity abounds
these days; so much fresh thinking seems to be emerging from those who
dare to forage beyond subject specialisms. Within an academic framework
this is still a profoundly unnatural activity, and with good reason. In the
late eighteenth century, Albrecht von Haller was already pointing out that
universities derived much of their effectiveness precisely from dividing ‘the
sciences into small parts [which gave] each man a small and limited respon-
sibility’.i His observation was prophetic: the number of university-based
fields of investigation multiplied some tenfold during the twentieth
century – a tree of knowledge from which much of what we know about
the world today emerged.
i Q uoted from Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia,
vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 160.
FOrEWOrD vii
The more mature elaboration of disciplines did clearly throw up bar-
riers to uncovering new insights, with bigger pictures in research being
overlooked. But while positive regard for interdisciplinary work is almost
ubiquitous, we seem to know surprisingly little about how such projects
actually work, and why they don’t when they fail. One of the great legacies
of Hubbub’s two-year residency lies in the group’s attentive introspection,
as well as the generous eagerness of the researchers to share what has been
discovered about just how much discipline needs to be applied to foster
creative interdisciplinarity.
As Hubbub members eloquently testify, where these unusual investigative
activities actually happen (the physical spaces) has been a vital part of their
project too. The Hub was deliberately designed as a dynamic working envi-
ronment that should take maximum advantage of the lower public floors: a
place from which to observe and then embrace the intriguing company of
strangers who populate them – sometimes as subjects, sometimes as collab-
orators, sometimes as audiences and often indistinguishably as all three. The
public realm, it turns out, provides an ideal ‘neutral’ territory, where people
are mostly ignorant of every specialism except their own, and in which a
rather rigid disciplinary matrix can artfully be folded back in on itself.
Hubbub would be the last to claim that it has cracked the one way in
which to do it, but its has been an inventive and highly productive experiment
in public research which many will follow.
Ken Arnold
Creative Director, Wellcome Trust
A
cknowledgements
We thank all those in London, Durham and elsewhere who have worked
with us to bring Hubbub to life. We are grateful to Charles Fernyhough
and Claudia Hammond, Associate Directors of Hubbub, for their advice,
feedback and contributions to this book.
We also thank The Pioneer Health Foundation for kind permis-
sion to reproduce the image and unpublished material in Chap. 10:
‘Mother watches while she and her daughter have their tea’, Wellcome
Library Archive, SA/PHC/H.1/6/8; Innes Hope Pearse, ‘Medical
Considerations for the Control of Contraception’, p. 4, Wellcome Library
Archive, SA/PHC/E.16/1, copyright The Pioneer Health Foundation.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [103817/Z/14/Z],
which also enabled us to publish this book in Open Access.
ix
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Felicity Callard, Kimberley Staines and James Wilkes
Part I Minds
2 A ltered States: Resting State and Default Mode
as Psychopathology 11
Ben Alderson-Day and Felicity Callard
3 The Quest for quies mentis 19
Hilary Powell
4 Writing and Daydreaming 27
Hazel Morrison
5 Daydream Archive 35
Felicity Callard
6 D escriptive Experience Sampling
as a Psychological Method 43
Charles Fernyhough and Ben Alderson-Day
xi
xii CONTENTS
7 The Poetics of Descriptive Experience Sampling 51
Holly Pester and James Wilkes
8 T he Rest Test: Preliminary Findings from
a Large-Scale International Survey on Rest 59
Claudia Hammond and Gemma Lewis
Part II Bodies
9 F rom Therapeutic Relaxation to Mindfulness
in the Twentieth Century 71
Ayesha Nathoo
10 So Even the Tree has its Yolk 81
James Wilkes
11 Cartographies of Rest: The Spectral Envelope
of Vigilance 91
Josh Berson
12 Getting the Measure of the Restless City 99
Des Fitzgerald
13 Drawing Attention: Ways of Knowing Derived
in the Movement of the Pencil 105
Tamarin Norwood
14 Songs of Rest: An Intervention in the Complex
Genre of the Lullaby 113
Holly Pester
15 Could Insomnia Be Relieved with a YouTube Video?
The Relaxation and Calm of ASMR 119
Giulia Poerio
