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 Johnathan Flowers. Currently, Johnathan works in the areas of Japanese philosophy, philosophy of disability, and philosophy of race; has interests in the social and philosophical effects of emerging technologies on identity; and explores cross-cultural examples of Deweyan habit in non-western philosophies. Beyond his work in philosophy, Johnathan is an avid martial artist and motorcyclist, recently earning his black belt in Shinkendo Japanese swordsmanship.

[Description of image below: Johnathan, who is seated at a table, speaks to someone from behind a microphone. His hands are in motion to aid the explanation that he offers and his facial expression seems both challenging and questioning. A piece of paper attached to the front of the table has Johnathan’s name on it in large letters. There is a bottle of water on the table]

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Johnathan! I previously interviewed you for Dialogues on Disability in August 2020 and January 2023. When I interviewed you in 2023, you had only recently started in your current tenure-track position at California State University at Northridge (CSUN). Our readers and listeners love to keep abreast of the lives of disabled philosophers that they meet through the Dialogues on Disability series. So, please bring us up to date and fill us in! Remind everyone of what you did before the CSUN job and tell us how, that is, in what ways, your new job changed your life.

Before I started my position at CSUN, I held visiting professor positions at American University in Washington DC and at Worcester State University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Although these were visiting positions, both were full-time jobs that provided me with health care and other benefits which are especially important to me as a disabled faculty member.

Since I started my tenure-track position at CSUN, I have become increasingly involved in curriculum development and providing undergraduate philosophers with opportunities for professional development. Specifically, I have served on the CSUN Disability Studies Advisory Board and have coordinated the CSUN Student Philosophy Conference for the past three years. I have also served as the faculty advisor for the CSUN Student Philosophy Society, which provides students with a forum outside of the classroom for discussion of philosophy.

My work in curriculum development has led to the introduction and adoption of several courses in philosophy and in disability studies, including Philosophy of Disability, which I will be offering again this fall. My Philosophy of Disability course—which is one of the most popular courses in the Disability Studies program and one of my most requested course offerings—is notable because CSUN is one of two institutions in the CSU system to offer such a course as a philosophy course within a philosophy department.

As for how my new job changed my life? I can honestly say that my new job has not materially changed my life. This point is worth emphasizing. Where labor in higher-education is concerned, both tenured and tenure-track faculty tend to believe that their interests as laborers are distinct from the interests of contingent and visiting faculty. But this is not the case, especially in a state as expensive as California. Given contemporary attacks on higher education, the increasing reliance on contingent labor, and administrative mandates for AI adoption in classrooms, I have the same administrative, pedagogical, and labor struggles that I did when I was visiting faculty.

Indeed, many of the same labor struggles that I dealt with as visiting and contingent faculty have in fact intensified as the administration of CSUN has proposed “working groups” to study health care, denied us course caps and workload protections, and has refused to provide us with protections from exploitation via AI. In short, it is my firm belief that tenured and tenure-track faculty have much more in common with contingent and visiting faculty than many of the former are willing to admit. So, one of the major changes in my life has been a deepened recognition of the need for solidarity across all faculty in the face of our common situation.

How, if at all, has your new status changed your views about the profession, its possibilities, and its exclusions? To put the question another way: now that you have the position at CSUN, do you feel empowered to a greater extent to challenge the oppressions and exclusions that constitute the profession and discipline of philosophy; or do you feel, at least in some ways, more constrained from doing so?

This is an interesting question. I would say that my views about the profession have not changed since I was a contingent faculty member. I continue to view the primary orientation of the field of philosophy as ableist and continue to believe that there is insufficient effort made by our professional organizations to eliminate ableism in the profession and in the organization of our professional meetings. Furthermore, I believe that there continues to be insufficient recognition within the profession of the growing number of disabled philosophers and philosophy students who want to employ the tools of philosophy to understand their own experiences of disability, develop anti-ableist ways forward for philosophy, and produce anti-ableist arguments that move forward society at large.

Now that I do have my position at CSUN, I feel slightly more empowered at times; but, at other times, not more so than I was prior to my appointment. As you and followers of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY are no doubt aware, I have refused to be silent about my own experience as a disabled person in philosophy and how my disability has shaped my philosophy and the kinds of work that I pursue. Insofar as this is the case, my new position has not provided me with additional leverage nor rendered me more vocal about disability. Put simply, if there is something to be taken from my new position, it is that we should not wait to be empowered before speaking up about disability and ableism in the profession.

That said, what I do find interesting is the willingness of previously apathetic or less interested colleagues to speak up in support of disability and disability rights in the profession with respect to accommodations and modifications of how we do philosophy in the wake of COVID and in response to Long COVID. That is, there is an increasing awareness of the precarious nature of ablebodiedness and the broader recognition that ablebodiedness is a temporary condition that could change at any time. To this end, there is an increased amount of disability-adjacent work in the field being done that emerges from experiences of Long COVID.

This observation gets me to the question of possibilities where disability is concerned. While I am hesitant to describe any mass disabling event as a “possibility,” Long COVID has the potential to reshape how we understand ourselves and our discipline with reference to how we do philosophy. The cognitive effects of Long COVID, for example, are experienced by a number of our senior and junior colleagues. Some of these experiences of Long COVID parallel some experiences of other disabled faculty and students, that is, disabled students and faculty who do not experience Long COVID. On this basis, I see a possibility for expanded solidarity among disabled philosophers and expanded understanding of the nature of disability through Long COVID. Unfortunately, I do not yet see many scholars capitalizing on this possibility.

What are your views about the ways in which disability studies, critical race theory, philosophy of disability, and philosophy of race are currently framed in academia? In other words, what do you think about the institutionalization of these fields in academia? Has this institutionalization betrayed their activist and community roots?

I would say that all three of these disciplines are marginalized through their institutionalization rather than their institutionalization serving as a betrayal of their activist and community roots. To be clear, institutionalization can limit the degrees to which members of these fields can engage in some kinds of activism; however, proponents of institutionalization foresaw this constraint when advocating for the development of these fields.

It is my understanding of the history of Africana Studies departments, for example, that faculty and students who pushed for their development recognized how the activist orientation would be limited by their institutionalization; yet these faculty and students judged this limitation as a necessary evil to both provide students with the education that they demanded and legitimize the study of Africana intellectual and cultural traditions. Put simply, institutionalization in the inherently ableist, racist, sexist, transphobic academy would mean a limitation on how these fields remain activist fields.

Many of these fields are institutionalized in the form of programs, not as departments. As programs, few of these units are empowered to offer bachelor’s degrees but rather must content themselves with offering minors, which are often viewed as aids or supplements to a primary major. As programs, furthermore, these units are given less funding and institutional support and must partner with other programs or other departments to engage in student or faculty-facing programming. This, then, is one of the primary advantages of institutionalization. More pressingly, few of these programs are able to hire dedicated faculty and must rely on faculty from other departments to staff and develop their curricular offerings. Finally, because of the structure of a program, these fields as programs are uniquely vulnerable to elimination under the auspices of budgetary crisis and austerity politics.

The activist orientation of a department, if there is one, is the result of the labor of the faculty in the department. To put this in extremely plain terms: the kinds of activism and the visibility of the activism of a given department are not solely limited by the institutionalization of disability studies, Africana studies, or philosophy of disability within an oppressive institution, but rather by the willingness of faculty to challenge oppressive structures in their pedagogy and their service to the university. That is, the limits of the oppressive structures of an institution are proscribed by the willingness of its faculty to endure them and to adopt the risks of opposing them. Insofar as faculty, even faculty in departments born of histories of struggle, are unwilling to engage in the activist work of challenging the oppressive structures of their home institutions, then we might raise the question of how these fields have betrayed their history.

That said, there’s one thing that readers and listeners of this interview might want to think about: namely, the nature of “activism” within the academy. As you are no doubt aware, any work in philosophy that is oriented towards improving conditions of a marginalized group or the conditions of society in general is labeled “activist” due to its focus on the experiences of this marginalized group, its advocacy for that group, or its efforts to induce social change. Bearing this categorization in mind, most departments of the kind that we’re talking about will be inherently labeled as “activist” and thus face additional risk in our age of rising right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. Indeed, as many of the transphobic letters signed by leading names in our own field have noted, activism is viewed as an existential threat to the academy due to the ways that it demands change. Insofar as this is the case, all of our fields are inherently activist; so, we need to wrestle with how we will wield that activism: For survival? For transformation? Or for the benefit of the image of the institution?

Johnathan, your work in philosophy of technology focuses on the social impacts of technology, especially the impact of technology on racialized people and disabled people, which are not mutually exclusive groups. For example, you contributed an excellent chapter on the topic to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability and you have co-authored articles with important Black feminist theorists of technology. Please tell us about your current work in these areas and the future directions it may take.

Currently, I am working on two projects in this area. In one project, I am developing a pragmatist treatment of online life as continuous with offline life. This work focuses on how digital sociality is in continuity with offline sociality as the habits of social conduct that we develop offline shape our engagements online and vice versa. This approach would treat “online” as its own social environment that cultivates unique habits of engagement with others. I view this project as especially valuable for theories of disabled sociality, as many disabled people point to the expansion of social media as enabling forms of sociality that they were previously denied. This kind of work, I think, has the potential to push back against claims of a neat divide between online life and offline life that persist in our increasingly digitized world. This project seems necessary, moreover, given the ways that the current American President makes policy via social media and the real offline effects that concerted online harassment online can have.

Another project that I am working on at present is entitled “Artificial Intelligence and the Promise of Happiness.” This project draws on Sara Ahmed’s work on “the promise of happiness,” which she construes as how following particular socio-cultural lines promise happiness as a return on the investment into the line followed. AI usage promises happiness in the form of efficiency, speed, objectivity, and accuracy through its use. Institutional leveraging of AI’s promise of happiness serves to reify this “happiness order”—that is, the social order that supplies the promise of happiness—into a “moral order” where opposition to AI becomes a moral injustice. We can see this transformation in the critiques according to which opposition to AI is opposition to the future and (in education) that opposition to AI will fail to prepare our students for a changing world. Colleagues with whom I have spoken about this project have pointed out the ways that it accounts for the moral rhetoric used by AI boosters to justify the potential harms of AI and its attendant technologies.

Finally, I have an abiding interest in AI adoption among disabled people. There are several contemporary AI applications that disabled people use which are, or have become branded as, AI. Insofar as these applications show no sign of reversion to their pre-AI states, we might have to accept the reliance of some accessibility technologies upon AI. In a forthcoming piece, I point to the use of AI in hearing aids as an example of AI integration into accessibility technology, from a mode which was previously understood as non-AI. This is what I call the “capture” of various industries by AI such that AI companies become synonymous with the technology in question. One of the things that disability studies, together with science and technology studies, and philosophy of technology will need to do in the coming years is sort out a framework with which to address the reliance of accessibility technologies on AI and its tensions with AI’s contribution to the inaccessibility of the world.

Please talk about your efforts to develop Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as an integrative principle and ground for acts of social justice.

I’ve been working on this project for quite some time and would like to eventually develop it into a book. To clarify the motivation for the project, I would like to provide a brief explanation of the “erotic” and the ways that it functions to enable what Lorde calls “scrutiny,” which I take to be crucial to any understanding the work that the erotic does in her broader philosophy.

In general, most philosophers encounter Lorde’s erotic through her pathbreaking 1978 piece “Uses of the Erotic” wherein she describes the erotic as “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings,” which is also “a considered source of power and information within our lives” and “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”  Furthermore, the erotic is also found through the sharing of joint activity. In this mode, the erotic “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference,” thereby enabling understanding across difference.

Something that most scholars overlook is Lorde’s insistence that the erotic is present throughout all elements of our lives. Lorde expresses this idea in a general sense, describing the erotic as a “kernel of energy” at her deepest core which, once released, empowers all aspects of herself through how it permeates her experiences, which she makes clear in “Uses of the Erotic.” For the erotic to flow through all aspects of our experience, however, it must be understood and released, which requires work and sensitivity. Lorde describes this work as “scrutiny,” or the interrogation of the implications of our acts in one section of our life for all sections of our lives. Scrutiny is not simply a form of “looking at” our lives but rather an active process of considering our lives through activity.

For Lorde, scrutiny is an intimate act in the very intimacy of which we find its erotic potential: it is an act of entering into painful intimacy with those aspects of our lives with which we are too afraid to engage, such that we come to accept them as part of who we are. This, then, is the principal value of the erotic act of scrutiny following Lorde: “As we learn to bear that intimacy, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their power over us.” While Lorde acknowledges that “We will probably always be afraid, because we have been socialized to fear; [fear] of being revealed, of being ridiculed, of being different, of being hurt,” the act of scrutiny makes that pain less difficult, makes the fear easier to bear. Thus, as the work of scrutiny is emotional, intimate, painful, and fundamentally erotic, it is also the means whereby we enter deeper connections with ourselves and others.

Scrutiny is work that can be done throughout a variety of activities. In “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and “Poetry Makes Something Happen,” Lorde describes poetry as an act of scrutiny, a form of illumination which generates a quality of light whereby we might come to understand the implications of our actions for the rest of our lives. Poetry as illumination, as erotic illumination, thus enables us to “give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt,” and, in doing so, allows us to enter into an intimate relationship with those aspects of our lives that (as I previously indicated) we are too afraid to confront within the space of our public or professional lives. Poetry as illumination also gives rise to what Lorde describes as “erotic knowledge,” which “becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.”

Through scrutiny, we come to understand the relative conditions of our lives, including the conditions that need to be changed or adjusted through social-justice work. For Lorde, a variety of activities can become the grounds for scrutiny, due to their erotic nature; but not every activity is equally erotic. As she states, the erotic, as a capacity for joy, is found “In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.” To this end, while “building a bookcase” or “examining an idea” might not seem like erotically charged, intimate activities, they become so through the ways that they provide the kinds of illumination that produces erotic knowledge, or knowledge about the implications of our lives.

As Lorde states: “The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing”. How acutely and fully we can feel in the doing of a given activity depends fundamentally on who we are and how the activity illuminates which elements of our lives.

For example, philosophy can be an erotically satisfying activity—due to the ways that it can illuminate all aspects of our lives through our inquiries—but only if directed towards ourselves. In doing so, philosophy reveals the kernel of the erotic within our lives and the conditions that suppress or make difficult the erotic as the opening of ourselves to others and the world around us. Insofar as this is the case, the erotic (and its power of illumination) serves as the ground for social justice because it reveals the conditions under which we are unable to grow and develop.

Johnathan, 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 would like to conclude with some advice for my colleagues in the academy. As I write this response to your question, we are days after the media-enabled suicide of Jason Arday in the United Kingdom. I call this “media enabled” because it is my position that the scrutiny imposed upon Arday because of accusations of plagiarism and the incessant abuse that he suffered at the hands of social media are what ultimately led to his tragic death. Arday’s treatment reveals the white supremacist structures under which marginalized scholars—particularly scholars of color—are forced to labor to acquire and maintain our positions within the academy.

My advice on this point is simple: we need to stand in solidarity with one another across disciplinary and institutional lines because any one of us could become the next Jason Arday, given the consistent targeting of marginalized scholars as frauds, as less than, as unworthy of our positions within the academy. We are always under critical scrutiny; and we can no longer afford to withhold from each other, or rob one another of the critical support necessary to survive the abusive, oppressive conditions of the academy. Now, how we offer solidarity will be relative to our institutional position and relative resources; but we can no longer afford to retreat into our departments and disciplines as if they are secure enclaves.

Johnathan, I could not agree with you more. Thus, as you know, I will lead a workshop on solidarity at the upcoming Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 7 conference in January 2027. I want to sincerely thank you, Johnathan, for contributing another important interview to the Dialogues on Disability series. This interview will make another notable addition to the archive of the series.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Johnathan Flowers’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 on Wednesday, September 16, 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.