About event
Join AusSTS online for the second keynote of 'Signals and Noises 2025' by Elizabeth Stephens.
Join the second keynote of the 2025 AusSTS “Signals and Noises” conference via Livestream. We are delighted to have Elizabeth Stephens (University of Queensland) with Jaya Keaney as a respondent. This panel will be chaired by Mardi Reardon-Smith.
To take part in the Livestream chat, please sign in with a Google/ YouTube account. Join the coversation on BlueSky with #signalsandnoises and #AusSTS25.Please note that the AusSTS conference is full, and this free livestream is for online users only.
Noisy Experiments: the Strange History of Incubator Baby Shows
This presentation recovers the history of the longest-running and most successful medical experiment ever conducted in public, in which premature infants were exhibited to a paying audience inside the then-new technology of the incubator. From the 1890s until the 1940s, tens of thousands of premature newborns were treated in “Infant Incubation Institutes” located initially in World’s Fairs, and then more permanently in a sideshow at the Coney Island Amusement Park. At a time when mortality rates for premature babies were as high as 90%, and “debility” at birth believed to be lifelong and irreversible condition, the Coney Island “Infantorium,” as it was popularly known, consistently reported survival rates over 80%. While often dismissed as little more than a curious footnote in the history of neonatology, this presentation argues that these incubator exhibitions has a profound cultural and clinical impact. Framed in the popular and medical press alike as “artificial mothers” or “automatic nurses,” and situated at the intersection of science and spectacle, infant incubator shows exemplify the shifting boundaries between human and machine, biological reproduction and technological modernity unfolding during the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker bios
Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens is Director of Research and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication and Art at the University of Queensland. Her publications include the monographs A Critical Genealogy of Normality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle, and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Artificial Life, co-authored with Oron Catts, Sarah Collins, and Ionat Zurr (UWA Press, 2025). Her recent Future Fellowship (2017-2022) examined the genealogy of experimental bodies produced by a biomedical imaginary since the emergence of modern biology and medicine. She is the founder and convenor of the Australasian Health and Medical Humanities Network, co-Editor of Australian Feminist Studies, and Immediate Past President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia.
Dr Jaya Keaney is a Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of feminist technoscience studies, queer and feminist theory, and critical theories of race. Her research across these fields explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist frameworks of embodiment and inheritance. Jaya is the author of Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (Duke University Press, 2023).
Chair bio
Dr Mardi Reardon-Smith is a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellent for Automated Decision-Making and Society working on ADM, ecosystems and multispecies relationships. Mardi is an environmental anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of the social dimensions of environmental management in intercultural contexts.
Our sponsors
Signals & Noises is sponsored by ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S); National Museum of Communication, Deakin Science and Society Network and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Deakin University is hosting us at Deakin Downtown.
Event Contact:
ssn-info@deakin.edu.auShare