The Sleepers: Study Day

The Sleepers: Study Day invites you to an afternoon of talks and conversation around rest, sleep and creative expression.

Bringing together writers and academics, this event explores how we might reimagine rest not as a luxury, but as a radical and necessary form of resistance. Through the perspectives of three powerful speakers — Jenny Chamarette, Akshi Singh, and Natalie D. Kane — we will reflect on how race, disability, activism and creativity intersect in everyday life and cultural work.

This event forms part of our wider programme for the exhibition The Sleepers, offering a space to pause, listen and collectively consider how rest can be protected and celebrated.

This event warmly welcomes members of the general public as well as students, researchers and academics.

Speakers

Jenny Chamarette

Dr Jenny Chamarette (Jenny/they/them) is a recovering academic and London-based writer on art, nature, place, disability and gender. Listed for international writing prizes including the Nan Shepherd, Fitzcarraldo Essay, and the Nature Chronicles, their writing has been published in anthologies by Saraband and Elliott & Thompson, commissioned by Unit and Grand Union galleries, and appears in Sight & Sound, Another Gaze, and Club des Femmes. They have published widely in academic spaces too, mainly on the intersections of embodiment, art and film. Jenny is also Co-Director of the MAI Feminism and Visual Culture imprint of Punctum Books. Their memoir-cum-cultural history, Q is for Garden: Tending the Histories of Queer Cultivation will be published by Manchester University Press trade wing in July 2026.

Natalie D Kane

Natalie D Kane is a curator and writer based in London. They are Curator of Digital Design at the V&A, and Curator of Design and Disability (June – Feb 2025).  With the V&A, they curated the official U.K. pavilion at the 2019 XXII Milan Triennale, showing the work of Forensic Architecture. Natalie is a Trustee of the British Games Institute / National Videogames Museum and on the Advisory Board for the Society for Computers and Law. Recently, they have joined the Barbican Renewal’s Access and Inclusive Design Advisory Group. They are editor of Design and Disability (2025), published with the V&A.

Akshi Singh
Author of In Defense of Leisure (2025), Singh is a writer, editor, and trainee psychoanalyst. Her work explores leisure, rest, and psychoanalysis through a radical lens, with a focus on how these intersect with literature and daily life.

Event Schedule

• 1:00–2:00 PM — Curator Tour of The Sleepers
• 2:05–2:30 PM — Talk by Akshi Singh
• 2:30–2:50 PM — Refreshment break
• 2:50–3:15 PM — Talk by Jenny Chamarette
• 3:15–3:40 PM — Talk by Natalie D Kane
• 3:45–4:15 PM — Speaker Q&A and Group Discussion

Talk descriptions

Akshi Singh on Marion Milner

Singh's talk draws on the autobiographical and psychoanalytical writing of Marion Milner to consider the disruptive and transformative potential of leisure, especially in women's lives. I'll approach the topic psychoanalytically, and consider the forms of refusal and resistance that are sometimes necessary to make space for leisure.

Crip Art in Crip Time by Jenny Chamarette

This speculative talk operates at the pace of crip time. Restful, slow, maybe even a little tardy - and it invites you to do the same. In recent decades, disability activists have shaped crip time to reflect the protracted, and sometimes joyful experience of lives out of sync with the strict confines of capitalist, ableist, performative efficiency. In this talk I make space for these percolations of rest, while offering a pathway in crip time through three contemporary artworks by disabled and chronically ill artists: Finnegan Shannon, Milda Januseviciute and Leah Clements.

Natalie D Kane

Access Information

• British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation will be provided if requested when booking.
• The room for the talks and the exhibition is wheelchair accessible.
• There are folding stools, benches and a large print guide in the exhibition.
• Refreshments will include a variety of dietary options.

Read our Access page to find out more about our spaces. Please get in touch if you have any further queries or requirements: womensart@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk or call the Porter's Lodge at +44 (0)1223 762100.