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This article builds upon emerging work on the geographies of sleep by turning to the sleep-hopeful body. More specifically, it attends to the methodological challenges posed by this work and the question of how spaces and states of sleep-hopefulness might be approached by geographers. Building on existing research on the geographies of biography, personal diaries are offered as a methodological avenue through which the sleep-hopeful body might be thought through. Two private diaries are used to discuss sleep as an affective process. The affective allows an opportunity for thinking sleepy bodies in relation to other non-human objects, things and forces. This opens up questions of how such processes can be known and recorded by the subject. These are held in relation to a wider discussion on the (un)knowing subject. The paper considers how diary entries might be used to get at the spaces and relations of sleep, between human and non-human bodies and the affective forces between them. The article concludes by considering what this approach and use of diaries brings to nascent geographies of sleep, and in turn, how attending to geographies of sleep might add to existing non-representational geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus , is the most widely distributed Microtus species in North America. Across its range, it shows marked demographic differences, experiences a large range of climatic conditions, and varies considerably in body size and life-history characteristics. To study the genetic basis of the geographic variation in size and life history of this species, we subjected three populations, one from central Canada and two from eastern Canada, to quantitative genetic analysis in the lab. We studied the variance and covariance of several size and growth variables as well as age and size at maturity by means of population crosses, full-sib analysis, and parent-offspring regressions. We found that the phenotypic differences among these populations are almost entirely due to environmental effects. However, within populations, additive genetic and maternal effects explain most of the variation. We discuss possible explanations for the lack of genetic differences among the populations and speculate that a similar reaction norm is maintained in all populations through heterogeneity in the temporal or spatial environment that the populations experience. The heterogeneity may be mediated through population density fluctuations, climatic variation, or variation in site productivity. Thus, we hypothesize that M. pennsylvanicus has evolved to be the best in all possible worlds rather than in one actual world. This study highlights the crucial importance of maternal and environmental effects on the size, growth, and life history of small rodents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]