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.
