Join Stanford PACS and the Cyber Policy Center for a monthly gathering that explores critical insights on the intersections and implications of technology and society. The Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series is a thought-provoking forum on the Stanford campus featuring leading experts and scholars examining the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality.

Light refreshments will be served. Please arrive 5 minutes early to avoid disrupting the guest speaker.

Spilker Engineering & Applied Sciences Building, Room 232

348 Via Peublo, Stanford University

Stanford, CA 94305

We are joined by Hannah Zeavin, scholar, writer, editor, and Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of History, as she explores how midcentury metaphors of "hot" and "cold" mothers shaped psychological studies, media theory, and the modern discourse on parenting, race, and neurodivergence.

Zeavin is the author of 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 for Penguin Press. Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left.

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.”

Request disability accommodations and access information here.

This event is made possible with support from the Humanities Seed Grant from Stanford Public Humanities.