Hannah Zeavin and Helen Charman return to the podcast to discuss the history of technology, media and mothering throughout the 20th century. We discuss the role media and technology play in the labor process of mothering, how media often becomes a site of panic and pathology, and what this all tells us about the relationship between the state and the so-called private household.
Hannah Zeavin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation and is Founding Editor of Parapraxis magazine. She is the author of The Distance Cure and more recently Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (both published by The MIT Press.)
Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her writing has been published in publications such as the Guardian, The White Review, and Another Gaze. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Her first book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood published last August.
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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington
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