Best, Concordia Best, Concordia

This is part 2 of a two-part episode. In this part, we're continuing our conversation with media practitioner and artist-researcher Prakash Krishnan from "Do The Kids Know?" We explore Instagram as a tool of community building and visual culture as a medium for empowerment.

Contributors: Dean's Office, "Best, Concordia" Podcast, and the Ethnography Lab at Concordia.

Prakash Krishnan (he/him) is a researcher and educator in the fields of digital media, archives, accessibility, and contemporary art. He recently completed a Master of Arts in Media Studies and is the coordinator at Concordia’s Access in the Making (AIM) Lab. Apart from his duties at AIM, Prakash co-produces and hosts Do The Kids Know?, a biweekly podcast exploring race, media, popular culture, and politics in Canada and occasionally moonlights as an artist, essayist, and comedian. Having had struggled in solitude to navigate issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality for over twenty years, Prakash is deeply committed in facilitating these discussions for those new to the work of un/learning.

This is part 1 of a two-part episode. In this part, we're talking to media practitioner and artist-researcher Prakash Krishnan from Do The Kids Know? about his podcast as well as the ways we can use our positions in academia to advance our activism.
Contributors: Dean's Office, "Best, Concordia" Podcast, and the Ethnography Lab at Concordia.
Prakash Krishnan (he/him) is a researcher and educator in the fields of digital media, archives, accessibility, and contemporary art. He recently completed a Master of Arts in Media Studies and is the coordinator at Concordia’s Access in the Making (AIM) Lab. Apart from his duties at AIM, Prakash co-produces and hosts Do The Kids Know?, a biweekly podcast exploring race, media, popular culture, and politics in Canada and occasionally moonlights as an artist, essayist, and comedian. Having had struggled in solitude to navigate issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality for over twenty years, Prakash is deeply committed in facilitating these discussions for those new to the work of un/learning.

This full episode serves to explore, discuss, and develop actionable practices to deconstruct syllabus and alternative forms of pedagogy, by looking at intersections between music jams and a classroom. How can we "jazz-up" our syllabus?
In the second part of episode 3, our team explore decolonial practices around syllabus deconstruction and explores new pedagogies inspired by artists, jam sessions and other ways to work together that gives room to each player, but also improves our listening and our way to tune in. Building on lived experiences we also highlight some of the best classroom experiences that push the limits of student agency and create a new learning environment. Some of these explorations could potentially evolve the social dynamics, to become undisciplined and flatten awkward power dynamics in the classroom towards horizontality.
DPP Members hosting:
Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, Chesline Pierre-Paul, Albane Gaudissart
Best Concordia Producer: Kris Millet
Editor: Connie Phung
Guests:
Matthias Mushinski: Matthias is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia. His doctoral research is, above all else, a rigorous celebration of another way of being together that is offered in the social aesthetics of free jazz and its improvisatory protocols. In April 2022 he will begin a residency at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia where he will study under the direction of Linda Goode Bryant, Thomas Lax, Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa. An avid record collector and olfactory cosmonaut, Matthias spends his days meditating on themes such as beauty, (non)relationality, and the distinction--or lack thereof--between montage and ensemble. He is part of a listening collective that hosts a monthly radio show on n10.as titled Out From Outside.

This full episode serves to explore, discuss, and develop actionable practices to deconstruct syllabus and alternative forms of pedagogy, by looking at intersections between music jams and a classroom. How can we "jazz-up" our syllabus?
In this first part, our team explore decolonial practices around syllabus deconstruction and explores new pedagogies inspired by artists, jam sessions and other ways to work together that gives room to each player, but also improves our listening and our way to tune in. Building on lived experiences we also highlight some of the best classroom experiences that push the limits of student agency and create a new learning environment. Some of these explorations could potentially evolve the social dynamics, to become undisciplined and flatten awkward power dynamics in the classroom towards horizontality.
DPP Members hosting:
Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, Chesline Pierre-Paul, Albane Gaudissart
Best Concordia Producer: Kris Millet
Editor: Connie Phung
Guests:
Matthias Mushinski: Matthias is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia. His doctoral research is, above all else, a rigorous celebration of another way of being together that is offered in the social aesthetics of free jazz and its improvisatory protocols. In April 2022 he will begin a residency at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia where he will study under the direction of Linda Goode Bryant, Thomas Lax, Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa. An avid record collector and olfactory cosmonaut, Matthias spends his days meditating on themes such as beauty, (non)relationality, and the distinction--or lack thereof--between montage and ensemble. He is part of a listening collective that hosts a monthly radio show on n10.as titled Out From Outside.

This episode features DPPH’s founding members, Hone Mandefro and Jamilah Dei-Sharpe, along with one of the Hub’s current members, Albane Gaudissart, sharing some of the history on the beginnings of the Hub and how it came to be. The discussion is facilitated by Kris Millet from Best, Concordia.
Speakers:
Jamilah Dei-Sharpe is a second-generation Canadian-Black Jamaican Ghanaian women, who specializes in decolonial pedagogy, Black masculinity, critical race and gender studies. She offers strategies for community mobilization, participatory facilitation and sedimenting critical pedagogies from her experiences co-founding the NBGN and the DPPH, with public speaking engagements and multiple initiatives against anti-Black racism on Concordia campus.

Hone Mandefro is an Ethiopian international Ph.D. student that has over a decade of experience lecturing and training students in Social Policy and Social Work. As well as extensive experience in international political advocacy with the Ethiopian polity.

Albane Gaudissart is a French gender equality activist that has been working for eight years in Tanzania with the feminist, decolonial Non-For Profit organization 'TATU Project'; using her MA Anthropology degree to research the adoption of mobile technologies in the Tanzanian community Maasais. She has unmatched expertise in managing social-justice organizations and grassroots activism, whilst connecting the DPPPH to her international Tanzanian network.

Facilitator: Kris Millet, PhD student in Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia.
Editor: Connie Phung, PhD student in Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia.

Reflections on Being Decolonial in a Digital World (Part 2)
Guest Speaker(s): Napatsi and Connie
This episode features the DPPH members and guest speakers Napatsi and Connie sharing their reflections on being decolonial in a digital world amid the COVID pandemic. The group share their lived experiences with race, pedagogy, and colonialism as they aspire to create de/colonial learning environments.
This episode proposes a reflections on race, racism, and being decolonial online during the COVID pandemic.