Meghanne Barker's research examines the pedagogical value of creative practices – including children’s play and performance, puppet theatre, and filmmaking – to postsocialist institutions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her book project based on her dissertation, Throw Your Voice: Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhood, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. Throw Your Voice examines acts of animation – when humans bring nonhuman objects to life or compel one another into action – as a way of maintaining fragile social relations and political order. Her ongoing research, Building New Film Cities, examines the role of media education to community building in the twenty-first century, within the context of the former Yugoslavia.
Meghanne Barker received her PhD in cultural anthropology, with a focus on linguistic anthropology, from the University of Michigan in 2017, with her dissertation entitled, Framing the Fantastic: Animating Childhood in Contemporary Kazakhstan. Prior to arriving at UCL, Barker held posts as an ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science, and as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.