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 LSE 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.