Johnathan Flowers is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His primary research areas include African American intellectual history and philosophy, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Feminist Philosophy and affect theory, with a specific focus on the affective organization of identity.

Outside of philosophy, Flowers works actively in the areas of Disability Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Comics Studies, where he applies insights from American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Race, and Disability Studies to current issues in human/computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, identity in digital space, and representations of identity in popular culture. 

Flowers is currently working to develop a poetics of experience through the work of Audre Lorde by treating her theory of the Erotic as an affective integrative principle which unites the self into a qualitative whole. Lorde's principle of the Erotic as integrative is what enables a unity of experience throughout the various aspects of Lorde's philosophy.

His first monograph, Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism was published by Lexington Books in 2023.