The UC San Diego Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, in collaboration with the Film Studies Program, presents an event in the Media Care Talk Series titled “The Far Voice” featuring Assistant Professor Hannah Zeavin of Indiana University. The event was held via Zoom on Feb. 27, 2023.

Speaker: Hannah Zeavin, Assistant Professor, Indiana University
Respondent: Alain J.-J. Cohen, Professor, Department of Literature, UC San Diego
Hosted by Wentao Ma, PhD Student, Department of Literature, UC San Diego

Abstract:
“The Far Voice” describes the rise of mass telecommunication therapies, focusing on the suicide crisis hotline (originated by Protestant clergy) in England and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and investigates how this service first became thinkable, and then widely adopted and used. I redescribe the hotline as psycho-religious in origin and intent, rather than as the secular service it has usually been assumed to be. I argue that these services, in their use of the peer-to-peer modality, radically upset former regimes of pastoral care and counseling, as well as those of psychodynamic therapy. Hotlines generate a new, hyper-transient frame for the helping encounter, removing nearly all the traditional aspects of the therapeutic setting except for speech and listening. At the same time, these hotlines devalue the need for expertise and rescind the fee associated with that expertise. They challenge every clinical concept associated with the structure and dynamic of the analytic encounter. It is contingent, it is not in person, and requires (or permits) a distanced intimacy with no guarantee of repeating; and it makes use of the phone—an appliance paradoxically thought of as capable of bringing people together and as responsible for their greater alienation. I will conclude by examining the afterlives of these radical early hotlines in our contemporary, when algorithmic surveillance, datafication, and tracking have relinked the hotline with forced hospitalization and carceral intervention.

Biography:
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, which will be releasing its first issue in Fall 2022, and serves as an Associate Editor for Psychoanalysis and History and an Editorial Associate for The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

About the Media Care Talk Series:
Dozing at the movie theater, listening to the podcast on the subway, counseling via Zoom appointments, searching immigration policy on the internet…In this increasingly crumbling world, media offer maintenance and sustain our vitality while they also harm our well-being through abuse and addiction. This talk series examines the concept of care and showcases the process of knowledge production surrounding artificial care in media practice. We will browse a range of media objects and platforms - from cinema to teletherapy, from smart drugs to sleep apps - and explore the habitual, affective, and material potential of healing and solidarity within film and media theories.

This series is co-organized by the Film Studies Program and the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts at UC San Diego with generous support from the following: 21st Century China Center, Department of Communications, Department of Visual Arts, Department of Literature, and the Institute of Arts and Humanities.