Qrescent Mason

This interview, conducted over several months between Lauren Guilmette and Taylor (“Tay”) Rogers, in conversation with Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel, examines the creation and impact of a film that Rogers produced as part of their doctoral research in Continental philosophy. The film’s creation process is, itself, of interest to contemporary Continental philosophy: this process was collaborative, emergent, and based on music that Rogers composed. In the interview, the film’s philosophical import is explored, from its connections to canonical figures like Nietzsche and Lugones to emerging feminist voices in philosophy of humour, trans studies, critical race studies, and themes related to embodiment, grief, affect, and relational ontologies. Readers are introduced to research-creation as an arts-based practice of research that holds great, often untapped value for philosophical inquiry.

This essay maps four Black feminist phenomenological reflections on care in the midst of polycrises. Linking the author’s series of Instagram stories ‘#MyBlackFeministCaronaChronicles’; an edited collection of West Philadelphia responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and uprisings, How We Stay Free; Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters; and bell hooks’s 1994 Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, the author seeks to describe how Black feminist modes of care are depicted via a Black feminist critical phenomenology that sees care as linked to intersubjectivity, intersectionality and liberation.

This interview, conducted over several months between Lauren Guilmette and Taylor (“Tay”) Rogers, in conversation with Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel, examines the creation and impact of a film that Rogers produced as part of their doctoral research in Continental philosophy. The film’s creation process is, itself, of interest to contemporary Continental philosophy: this process was collaborative, emergent, and based on music that Rogers composed. In the interview, the film’s philosophical import is explored, from its connections to canonical figures like Nietzsche and Lugones to emerging feminist voices in philosophy of humour, trans studies, critical race studies, and themes related to embodiment, grief, affect, and relational ontologies. Readers are introduced to research-creation as an arts-based practice of research that holds great, often untapped value for philosophical inquiry.