‘Sleeping on the job’: where qualitative fieldwork meets the sociology of sleep

Abstract

This article examines the question of sleeping (or not) during the course of ethnographic fieldwork. It is argued that the concept of what is termed here ‘sleepwork’ has yet to be fully addressed or adequately problematised in the fields of sociology and social anthropology, in particular. The first part of the article highlights the relative silence about sleeping and fieldwork in the literature on qualitative research methods, and reflects upon why this subject is largely absent from the ethnographic corpus. I then make a number of propositions about some potential methodological strategies for incorporating ‘sleepwork’ into fieldwork. The second part of the article suggests that data analysis should not be seen as an activity that only occurs in states of wakefulness, but rather as a 24/7 activity that is undertaken with varying intensity.