Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and thirty-sixth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Damion Scott. Damion recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and is currently an adjunct lecturer at Montclair State University, where he teaches courses in Ethics and Community Engagement, American Pragmatism, and Nietzsche. He is the author of “Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Distinctions,” published in Critical Black Futures, and “Puzzles on Triton: Logical Pluralism, Fictional Facts and Methodology in Afrofuturistic Theory and Practice,” which is forthcoming in The Edinburgh Companion to Afrofuturism. His monograph, Tractatus de Speculatione Obscura: Logical Speculative Realism, Science Fiction, and Metaphilosophy, is currently under review for publication.

[Description of photo below: a selfie of Damion. He is wearing a dress-shirt and patterned tie. The heads of other people can be seen behind him, as well as tall pine trees and a tall building with many windows.]

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Damion! I interviewed you for the series back in December 2015. I know that, since then, a great deal has happened in your professional life in philosophy and other aspects of your life. Please bring our readers and listeners up to date on what has transpired.

Hello Shelley, thank you for inviting me to be a part of this month’s interview. Given that our previous interview took place 11 years ago, a lot has changed and a few things have not changed. I’ll begin with a relatively recent and positive development.

On a biweekly basis for the last year, I have been mixing music as a DJ on Eruption Radio 101.3 DAB in the United Kingdom (UK). I broadcast from my home studio here in Manhattan, New York City, playing jungle, house, and some hip hop and dancehall music. It is a great outlet for my love of music and musical aesthetics.

I am currently employed at Montclair State as an adjunct lecturer. I have a reliable and trustworthy chair there. Like many full-time faculty in decision-making positions, however, his hands are tied when it comes to offering a tenure-track position, much less a visiting assistant position. Given current Department of Education policies and the broader instability in American higher education, I understand that this amounts to a de facto hiring freeze, with all of the chaos, uncertainty, and blatant assaults on the education sector.

I have, at least, an informal agreement to continue at Montclair State until I find a postdoc or tenure-track position. Now that I have my doctorate, new doors are indeed opening. I am in a better position to apply for postdocs and tenure-track jobs than I was when I taught for several years before I had completed my dissertation (i.e., I was “ABD”: all but dissertation) and graduated.

I was fortunate to have had strong outcomes on the job market. While ABD, after roughly 30 to 40 applications, I was granted interviews with the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) for a full-time faculty position and with the Philosophy Department at Fairfield University for a tenure-track position. I made it past the first round of interviews at SCI-ARC and the second round of interviews at Fairfield.

Ultimately, I did not land either position. Not getting the SCI-ARC position resulted in my acquiring an external reader, Professor Graham Harman, who was genuinely favorable to my work. Since my defense, Graham has become both a friend and colleague.

I hold a B.A. from New York University and three M.A. degrees: one from Birkbeck College, University of London; one from SUNY Stony Brook in art and aesthetics; and one from Columbia University. At Columbia, I pursued graduate study in African American Studies, taking seminars in history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy with amazing scholars. I completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook under the supervision of Harvey Cormier, Edward Casey, Anne O’Byrne, and, as I mentioned earlier, Graham Harman.

As you know, Shelley, this degree of training across disciplinary boundaries is quite unique, and my set of educators is, I think, quite distinctive on the job market today. I am extremely hopeful about landing a position in the next cycle, even though the usual rejections have already begun to arrive. I defended and was conferred this past May and have since sent out roughly 20 applications, mainly to universities in the UK, Germany, Ghana, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, and China, as well as for a few positions on the east coast of the United States—mainly at good institutions where I do not have to worry that I will be told to “go back to my country” or be snatched off the streets.

I never thought that the day would come when an American citizen would feel that they must, at times, carry official I.D. everywhere just to ensure basic privacy and safety. There are many other people who would and should feel this insecurity far more than I do, but not being a white Christian and being someone who cares about critical rationality and compassion means that I can also be targeted in certain ways. I am more careful with my social media posts during these times, and I have thrown myself into my work to shield myself from what feels like the overwhelming collective cruelty and the depressing orgy of irrationality that we call “The United States” today.

I want out of the United States as soon as practically possible. As you know from my earlier interview, I was born in New York and I am proud of my city, even though there is much to criticize. I cannot say the same about the country overall. I love the United States in the same way that I love Jamaica, the UK, Japan, and Thailand—countries I have lived in—but there is too much to criticize, and not enough decency, compassion, and public rationality for it to feel sustainable in terms of well-being or overall safety.

As I said, I am extremely hopeful about the next job cycle, even as rejections continue to come in. When I was younger, after my first M.A., I was warned about the continental-analytical divide and racism in the field. Now that I have completed my doctorate, I find myself thinking more about ageism and sexism, alongside the stubborn persistence of division between the continental and analytical approaches. But again, let me not complain.

Nonetheless, if I cannot find a position in the next two cycles, I think it will be fair to ask, seriously and without rhetoric, whether anybody in the field could give me a straight answer as to why not.

Tell us about your dissertation research.

My dissertation interrogates the relationship between pragmatism and phenomenology from the standpoint of both fundamental and regional ontology. The aim is to situate a more appropriate role for revolutionary natural sciences and innovative arts in relation to their respective fundamental orientations.

In the middle section, I undertake an extended discussion of the conceptual tensions between phenomenological and pragmatic theories of meaning and between explicit and implicit ontologies. Speculative Realism, specifically, an object-oriented ontology (OOO), is the key to my project, as OOO theorizes that the scientific and creative potentials of objects and relations may be found in the respective agent-neutral and agent-relative powers and capacities of any “real” object. From this perspective, both phenomenological and object-oriented interventions could provide needed corrections to some of the concerns generated by inconsistencies of synthesizing a pluralistic naturalism, ameliorative political fundamentalism, or conceptual role inferentialism as determinative pragmatic methodologies. Comparing various varieties of pragmatism and critical phenomenology and a formal analysis of core commitments of object-oriented ontology constitutes the majority of the argumentation in these chapters.

I conclude with specific applications of reconceived critical naturalistic phenomenology and neo-pragmatism to projected future conceptions of race and ethnicity within futuristic fictional, semantic and social-ontological contexts. These applications begin from the observation that objectivity works in many ways and expresses a variety of meanings. For instance, some people might be transracial right now and not “realize” it. Or maybe they, or someone else, might know that they are transracial-hyper-objective opaque hyposubjects yet are compelled to hide such information from a prejudiced, hostile social world. Some forms of intelligent artificial life might have precisely zero, two, or two thousand gender categories, perhaps a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Possibilities of actual identities are constrained by the practicalities of a world, and the philosophy of practicality, in the main, is pragmatism. Now, very few things are as impractical as speculation regarding possibilities of fictional essences and differences; yet, funny enough, we can sense these things quite easily as they seem to necessarily depend on real objective distinctions. The fundamental ontology of the “real” is realism.

You have taught at a variety of institutions, some of them simultaneously. Please tell us about your experiences as a precariously employed disabled philosopher.

With respect to the arthritis and fibromyalgia that we discussed 11 years ago, I have learned strategies to manage them better. I still have daily pain, but it tends not to be as intense as when these issues first appeared. However, pain management still affects aspects of my life, such as general activity and fitness levels. I feel comfortable enough in my body overall. Since my disability is invisible, I sometimes find myself downplaying it as I get older. I am not proud of this, but ableism generates practical barriers, and navigating these structural barriers sometimes requires a degree of self-concealment.

My financial situation is still often quite precarious, but my experiences teaching at John Jay College, City College, Brooklyn College, Stony Brook, Cooper Union, Fordham, and Montclair have given me far more teaching and research experience than many newly conferred Ph.Ds. At times, I worry that I am in a sense “overqualified” in classroom teaching, though I have genuinely enjoyed my teaching experiences at all these institutions.

So, being an adjunct is still, in some respects, precarious. For example, a tenure-track position became open at an institution where I had been a long-term adjunct. The chair knew that I was very keen to apply, given my familiarity with the department, administration, and my extremely positive teaching evaluations every semester. I was asked to be part of a search committee, which is extremely unusual for adjuncts. When I asked about the committee, the chair requested a phone call instead of email.

In that call, I was given two reasons for my participation on the committee: first, that they needed a person of color on the committee, and second, that the dean would only hire a cis or trans woman—something that could not be put in writing due to its illegality. This information put me in a very difficult position where I felt that I had to be a team player, but I also realized that reviewing a hundred dossiers from men and not having the opportunity to apply myself was blatantly unfair. I was extremely surprised by this situation.

Following this event, I was let go from this position without cause nor an honest and satisfactory explanation. Luckily, I was able to find another position here in the tri-state area with, again, a reliable, kind, and trustworthy chair. Despite this experience, I continue to enjoy teaching, and I am grateful for my appointments across different institutions. I may be “precariously” employed, but I have a knack for staying employed.

In your previous interview, you talked about your work in Afrofuturism. In the interim, you published “Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Distinctions.” Please describe the claims of this essay.

My book chapter “Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Distinctions”—which appears in the Palgrave-Macmillan volume Critical Black Futures, edited by Dr. Philip Butler—engages contemporary debates in metaphysics, social ontology, aesthetics, and Africana philosophy by exploring the future conceptual status of race, ethnicity, and post-human identity.

While a lot of recent work on the metaphysics of race focuses on defining what race is, my approach looks at how speculative and futuristic narratives can help clarify differences between race, lived cultural affiliation, visible ethnicity, and multicultural social identity. I defend a quasi-essentialist, pragmatic-fictionalist view, suggesting that even post-racial and post-human futures can support meaningful forms of social and cultural unity. In doing so, my research tries to connect metaphysical questions with broader ethical, political, and technological issues about how future human, transhuman, and virtual post-human communities might be organized.

The aforementioned chapter on Afro-futurism led you to be featured in a 2022 Smithsonian Channel/Paramount documentary entitled “Origins of Afrofuturism.” Our readers and listeners would love to know about the documentary and the experience of making it.

I was invited by my friend, author Mark Dery, to join the project alongside another Afrofuturist artist and scholar, Ytasha Womack. My role was to discuss the history and applications of Afrofuturistic literature, music, film, and sociopolitical values in popular culture. We filmed during COVID. It was somewhat surreal to be in a massive soundstage studio in Chelsea (Lower Manhattan) when it was so empty. We worked with a minimal crew: director Alexis Aggrey, her producers, and the rest of the film crew. All of them were kind and good at their craft. Overall, it was a great experience.

I will say, though, that we faced a few issues. First, our director was under pressure from Paramount-Smithsonian executives to cut many of the expert interviews and include more footage from an artist collective in Baltimore (they were very good additions to the documentary, don’t get me wrong); so the documentary ended up a lot less edifying than I had hoped. Second, the production team had to rush during the final months to ensure that the documentary was released just before the Ryan Coogler film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I know that there was quite a bit of stress during post-production. Feel free to have a look. Again, I am proud of it, even though the final film turned out quite differently from what many of us who took part in it had expected.

Before I ask you a last question, Damion, I want to mention to you and our readers and listeners that, currently, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, has an unforgettable retrospective exhibition of Camille Turner’s incredible work in performance, video, photography, installation, and storytelling, including recent extensions of her Afro-futuristic narratives about “Afro-nauts” who visit present-day Earth to conduct research on the history and situation of Black people in Canada. This outstanding exhibition runs until January 3, 2027. Anyone who can come to Hamilton for a day to witness this exhibition should do so.

Damion, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

Shelley, I want to apologize about what occurred with our potential collaboration a few years ago. You may recall that you kindly invited me to contribute to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. I’m still very grateful for that invitation. However, the summer that the chapter was due, I scraped together money, sublet my apartment, and traveled to Thailand with the intention of finishing my dissertation in a new setting. I was deep into writing the middle section at the time; but I also must admit that I got a bit too distracted enjoying Thailand, which made it difficult to stay on track and meet the deadline. So, I just want to say thank you, again, for thinking of me as a contributor, and I’m genuinely sorry that I was unable to complete the chapter in time.

Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed again for Dialogues on Disability. It is very well read, and deservedly so. I have always appreciated your kindness and generosity over the years that we have known each other. I wish you, and all the readers of the blog, all the very best going forward.

Damion, thank you very much for your acknowledgement of the importance of the series and for your kind remarks about me personally. I hope that readers and listeners of this interview will explore your work, some of which is cited and linked to in this interview.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Damion Scott’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me again on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, for the next installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of each month ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.