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, 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.