Meghanne Barker – Throw Your Voice

Q&A with Meghanne Barker, author of Throw Your Voice: Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods

Briefly describe your book

Throw Your Voice tells the story of children getting separated from their parents, and their eventual reunion, in a contemporary Kazakhstani institution. It also tells the story of a government puppet theatre, and of their staging of a similar story about a dog, Kashtanka, who gets separated from her first master. Weaving these two ethnographic field sites together, it considers how everyday acts of fantasy help to maintain absent relations and make new ones in a temporary home. It takes animation as an analytic for understanding the distributed and collective act of bringing a person to life and of sustaining their development. It looks at children’s play, their performances for visiting sponsors, and the professional puppetry of adults as all offering insights on the ideology of childhood in Kazakhstan. It also considers the stakes that such projects have for the children, their professional caregivers, the parents who visit and will resume care, for the puppeteers, and for larger political projects promoting children as the future of Kazakhstan.

Why did you choose to publish with a University Press?

I chose Cornell University Press because they are well-known for offering excellent scholarship both
in anthropology and in Eastern Europe and Eurasian Studies, and I wanted my book to be in
conversation with both fields. I had great support from my editor, Jim Lance, throughout the process,
and got valuable feedback from the anonymous peer reviewers, all of which certainly made the book
better.

Do you enjoy the writing process?

I am one of the few people I have met who loves writing a first draft! I find editing to be much more
difficult.

What is the last thing you read not for research/work? OR What book would you recommend right now?

I recently read Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and found it remarkable, if frustrating. I won’t
give away the ending but will only say that if it had ended about 50 pages earlier, it would have been
much more powerful. I mention this book because it resonates with my own. It’s about a separation
from parents during childhood and a fantasy of return. It begins with references to David Copperfield,
one of so many of Dickens’ works featuring an orphaned character and the most autobiographical,
but the character’s life work becomes seeking that lost home of parental love. The protagonist is a
detective, which also led me to reflect on our work as social scientists – or as scholars more
generally – and the kinds of investigations we do, as a kind of detective work, but without ever
seeming to solve anything.

As a graduate student, I only ever read “for work,” I barely ever had time or made time for fiction. Now
it’s almost the opposite, and I wish I would sit down and read an ethnography, cover to cover, the way
I do novels, for it is wonderful to find a scholarly work that compels one to read to the very last page.

What advice would you offer to young academics wishing to follow in your footsteps?

Choose to study things that you find compelling, because the whole process is so difficult, it’s the
only way to keep going, and if you ultimately decide to stop, at least you’ve spent a bit of time
considering an issue that matters to you. You’ve learned more about it, and it will have helped you
develop, as a person.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Alaina Lemon, my PhD advisor, said, “It’s 11 o’clock. The store is closed. Open the refrigerator. What’s
for dinner?” It’s about writing with the materials you have, rather than what you would ideally have.

What does a typical working day look like for you?

I drop off my kid at daycare at 8am, return home to work on writing and research in the morning,
exercise and eat lunch, and after lunch is when I try to have more meetings and emails because I
write better in the morning. This is on non-teaching days. Teaching days are mostly devoted to
teaching and student meetings. I pick up my kid around 5pm and try not to work in the evenings. Life
is short!


Meghanne Barker is Lecturer in Education, Practice and Society at the UCL Institute of Education and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is an editor of Semiotic Review. Throw Your Voice: Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods is published by Cornell University Press.