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Matrix, Environment, Atmosphere: How Mother Became a Medium - Hannah Zeavin, PhD (Webinar live online)
2026 Grand Rounds Series
From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.”
Hannah Zeavin, PhD, is a scholar, writer, editor, and associate professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. Zeavin is the author of the award-winning books, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press, 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance (US: Penguin Press; UK: Fern Press), for which she received a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and a 2024 Whiting Foundation Non-Fiction Grant. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis.
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- 1.00 APA
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