Prakash Krishnan (he/him) has worn many hats in his life. Formerly a health physicist working in nuclear waste disposal, Prakash has also been a frontline community worker for over a decade in areas such as youth programming, recreational therapy, housing-insecurity outreach, and safe drug use.
Since 2018, Prakash has been a graduate student at Concordia University. Having first graduated from the Graduate Diploma Program in Communication Studies, he is now a Master of Arts candidate in Media Studies. Prakash’s thesis explores alternative models of transnational community archiving using social media. Broadly, his research interests are in media production, diaspora studies, critical disability studies, queer theory, affect, and feminism. He has published other writings on feminist archives, contemporary art, and LBGTQ+ organizing in the form of reviews, interviews, and peer-reviewed, scholarly articles in publications including PUBLIC, Plot(s) Journal of Design Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materiality (ed. Traganou).
Prakash continues to be involved with several organizations both within and outside academe. At Concordia University, along with being part of AIM’s governing collective, he is an active member of the Feminist Media Studio, the Participatory Media and Speculative Life clusters and at Milieux Institute, the Centre for Expanded Poetics, and the Media Studies Student Association. He has previously worked as a research assistant for Ageing+Communication+Technology (Kim Sawchuk), Archive/Counter-Archive (Charles Acland), and McGill University’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education (Philip Howard). He has also been a teaching assistant for Moving Images (undergraduate and graduate diploma) and Effective Communication.
In the community, Prakash is heavily involved in the fields of arts and culture. In 2020, he was the inaugural Fresh Pages Guest Curator for the Quebec Writers’ Federation and is now the manager of cultural mediation at the artist-run centre, Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood where he also sits on CLARK’s anti-racism committee. In addition to several academic conferences where he has presented research on decolonial and alternative media practices, he has also been an invited guest speaker on panels and podcasts as well as workshop facilitator on anti-racism, diversity, feminism, art, and community organizing. In his spare time, he co-produces and hosts the weekly anti-colonial Canadian media podcast, Do The Kids Know?