Pritha Prasad

My research, which lies at the intersections of rhetoric and writing studies, critical university studies, feminist and queer studies, and critical race studies, tracks how institutions of higher education discursively and materially negotiate and engage the rhetorics and world-making practices of antiracist and decolonial movements. At present, I am working on two book manuscripts. The first, tentatively entitled Rematerializing Race/isms: Rhetoric After Ferguson, draws upon institutional policy statements, professional conferences, digital and analog liberation protests, English studies disciplinary histories, and pop culture to argue that the 2014-2015 Ferguson Uprising marks a critical discursive shift in cultural and academic engagements with racialized state-sanctioned violence. I historicize this shift in relation to other key moments of racial unrest in U.S. historical memory. Examples include post-WWII collusions between state universities and U.S. geopolitical initiatives; the Civil Rights-era formation of institutional diversity initiatives; Reagan-era colorblind rhetorics and English Only Movements; and the 2010s-2020s logics of post/racialization and anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) legislation that continue to inform and constrain racial liberation movements in and beyond the university.



My second book project, entitled The Benevolent Gaslight: A Technology of Race-Making (co-authored with Dr. Louis M. Maraj, U. British Columbia), explores how U.S. rhetorics of whiteness have systematically and historically situated racial trauma and injury as teaching/learning moments in the teleological pursuit of collective progress. The Benevolent Gaslight interrogates this phenomenon across humanities disciplines, educational history, university race management, and popular culture.