Dr Aneesh Barai

I am an interdisciplinary scholar in education and children’s media and culture, working with children’s literature, film, television and games from a range of global and historical contexts.

My current monograph project, which builds from my PhD thesis, is on shifts in cultural attitudes towards childhood in the UK in the 1920s and 30s, as represented through children’s literature by modernist authors (T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes).

My research interests include:

-Early twentieth century cultural representations of shifts in education, including in children’s literature, modernist literature and cinema in the period (e.g. Enid Blyton, Geoffrey Trease, D. H. Lawrence, in relation to the educational philosophies of Montessori, Dewey and Piaget).

-The neoliberalisation of higher education, as represented in fantasy novels about wizard universities (e.g. Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Lev Grossman, Cecilia Tan).

-Youth activism relating to pacifism, climate crisis and LGBTQIA+ youths, in children’s film, television and computer games (e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle, Steven Universe, She-Ra, Final Fantasy VII).

My current projects working with colleagues in the School of Education include:

-Storyland: This project uses participatory collaborative design with children to develop a new inclusive storytelling approach in Virtual Reality for children and is a partnership with Cooperative Innovations. I am working with colleague, Dr Becky Parry, to develop recommendations for participatory and collaborative design in VR.

-Trespass Evaluation: This project takes an innovative approach to participatory research, organised by Dr Becky Parry, and run with the work of two Research Associates, in collaboration with Network Rail and the National Railway Museum. We have also undertaken archival research with the museum into historical campaigns to prevent dangerous behaviour around railway lines, including examining works by Roger Hargreaves, Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake made especially for anti-trespass campaigns.

-Dinosaur Roar: This project is in preliminary stages of a collaboration with Nurture Rights. Working with Dr Yinka Olusoga, I am providing an initial review of children’s dinosaur encyclopedias to contribute to further stages of consultation for Nurture Rights as they develop a series of resources to engage children in innovative ways with the lives of dinosaurs.