Week 6 Nap Lab: Three regimes

The last Nap Lab before the break — the three cultural regimes set against each other, and your case study plan tested by someone who is not you

29 March 2027

The last lab before the mid-semester break, and the one that decides whether your Cultural Case Study is an essay about a place or an argument about a question. That difference is most of the mark, and it is much cheaper to fix now than in week 8.

Before the lab#

• Bring the culture you chose in week 5, and whatever you have read since. “Nothing yet” is an acceptable answer this week and will not be in the next one.
• Have your Nap Log ready to submit. The recording period is finished; if the analysis is not, come anyway and use the last part of the session.

In the lab#

Mapping, thirty minutes. Two axes on the board — scheduled to unscheduled, private to public. Each group places siesta, wǔxiū and inemuri, then the document they brought last week. The arguments start immediately and they are the point: inemuri is the one that splits a room, because sleeping in a meeting is maximally public and yet nobody scheduled it.

Your regime, added. You place your chosen culture on the same axes in front of people who do not know it. If you cannot place it, you do not yet know what your case study is about, and finding that out today is the best outcome available in this session.

Question, not country, twenty-five minutes. In pairs, you turn “I am writing about Spain” into something answerable. A question has a form like what does a person have to be seen to be, in order to sleep in this setting, and who decided that? Your partner’s job is to refuse anything that could be answered by an encyclopaedia entry. Be strict with each other; the marker will be.

Nap Log clinic, remaining time. Bring your analysis and ask about it. The most common failure is a fortnight of careful entries followed by three sentences of summary — the entries are the evidence, and the analysis is the thing being assessed.

Afterwards#

The Nap Log is due this week. Submit it before the break rather than during it: the analysis benefits from being written while the fortnight is still recent.

Over the break, read a first-hand account from your chosen culture — a diary, an interview, a complaint, a set of workplace rules. You need one voice from inside the arrangement. Week 7 picks the course back up on who is permitted to be seen sleeping, which is your case study’s question in a different setting.