Dr. Hannah Zeavin: Speaking as Part of Disrupting Disruptions
Virtual/ Online Event with Professional Live Captions in English)
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“Auto-Intimacy” engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic and other automated therapies. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake, diagnosis, and psychological education, and the wholesale simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment to batch process patients. Each tradition was responsive to pressures on mental health care at midcentury, as well as new understandings of the mind that appeared in the same period. This talk offers an overview of the social and ethical implications of these treatments as they move from care to capture to control across the second half of the 20th century into our present.
About the speaker:
Dr. Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology, feminist STS, and media theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference.
Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is now out from MIT Press, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Other academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere.
Essays and other public writing have appeared or are forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine,The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, The New York Review of Books, Slate, The Washington Post, and beyond.
In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis Magazine. She is also an Associate Editor at Psychoanalysis & History and an Editorial Associate of The Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association.
This event is part of the 5th Season of the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series, organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum.
Our series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the DIGS Lab, Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, MILA, Dean of Arts Grant, ReQEF, and more (see our website!)
There is no fee required to attend this event. We will provide professional captions in english.