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.

Felicity Callard is Director of Hubbub, The Hub at Wellcome Collection, UK and Professor in Social Science for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK.

Kimberley Staines is Project Coordinator at Hubbub, The Hub at Wellcome Collection, UK and an employee of Durham University, UK, with a background in law and publishing.

James Wilkes is Associate Director of Hubbub, The Hub at Wellcome Collection, UK. He is a poet, writer and Senior Researcher at the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK.

Presents new, interdisciplinary insights about rest and its opposites Offers inspiration for other research projects Includes accounts of how the contributors and editors have tracked and reflected on their work across disciplinary boundaries to investigate rest as an aesthetic, political, physiological and sociological phenomenon

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.