April 9, 2025
University of Southern California

Meghanne Barker (University College London)

The Ethnography Studio co-sponsored with the USC Department of Anthropology a talk by Dr. Meghanne Barker (University College London) titled, “Throw Your Voice: Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods,” based on Meghanne’s recent book of the same name (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Throw Your Voice is a story of loss and recovery. It relates how children placed in a temporary care institution make sense of their situations. Moving between a Kazakhstan government children’s home, Hope House, and the Almaty State Puppet Theater, Meghanne Barker shows how children, and puppets, as proxies, bring to life ideologies of childhood and visions of a rosy future. Sites and stories run in parallel. Framed by the narrative of Anton Chekhov’s “Kashtanka,” about a lost dog taken in by a kind stranger, the author follows the story’s staging at the puppet theater. At Hope House, children find themselves on a path similar to Kashtanka, dislodged from their first homes to reside in a second. The heart of this story is about living in displacement and about the fragile intimacies achieved amidst conditions of missing. Whether due to war, migration, or pandemic, people get separated from those closest to them. Throw Your Voice examines how strangers become familiar, and how objects mediate precarious ties. She shows how people use fantasy to mitigate loss.

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.