
Joel Michael Reynolds
PhD
Senior Advisor
Download CV for Joel Michael Reynolds
Joel Michael Reynolds is a senior advisor to The Hastings Center and an assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University. He is also the founder of the Journal of Philosophy of Disability, which he edits with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. His research and public engagement center on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and embodiment. What does flourishing mean in the genomic age? How do our bodies shape experience, understanding, and judgment? How can bioethics better incorporate the insights from disability studies and activism? He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of institutions ranging from medicine to politics. Seeking to bring reflective and empirical insights together, he engages work across the humanities and social sciences, with a special emphasis on the role of lived experience. Dr. Reynolds is the co-director, with Erik Parens, of a 2-year, $250k NEH Public Humanities Community Conversations grant project: “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology.”
Dr. Reynolds is the author or editor of five books: The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (forthcoming in 2022 with University of Minnesota Press), The Meaning of Disability (under contract with Oxford University Press), Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (under contract with Polity), The Disability Bioethics Reader (forthcoming in 2022 with Routledge and co-edited with Christine Wieseler), and The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology (forthcoming in 2023 with Oxford University Press and co-edited with Liz Bowen, Erik Parens, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson). Also with Erik Parens, he co-edited a 2020 special issue of The Hastings Center Report entitled, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” Dr. Reynolds is the author or co-author of over thirty journal articles and book chapters, and his current research includes a number of article-length studies as well as chapters for The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Claiming the Canon: Philosophy’s Disability History, and The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling. His public philosophy has been featured in TIME, The New York Times (forthcoming), HuffPost, AEON, Health Progress, and in a Tedx talk, and he is a regular contributor to the researcher-led news outlet The Conversation. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy as well as in Religious Studies from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University. From 2017-2020, Dr. Reynolds was the inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center. For more detailed information, please see his website: https://joelreynolds.me
IN THE MEDIA
ITSP Magazine’s “The Future of the Future” Podcast: “Disability, Technology, and Flourishing w/ Joel Michael Reynolds”
The Conversation: “3 Ethical Reasons to Vaccinate Your Children”
Examining Ethics Podcast interview on “Caregiving, Finite Responsibility, and Infinite Hope”
AEON on The Politics of Prognosis
TIME on gene-editing, disability, and family
TEDx talk on ethics, disability, and family
The UnMute Podcast interview on philosophy, technology, stigma, and disability
SELECTED SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS & COMMENTARIES
Joel Michael Reynolds, Laura Guidry-Grimes and Katie Savin, Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30(2)
Joel Michael Reynolds and David M. Peña-Guzmán, “The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Injustice,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29(3): 205-242
Joel Michael Reynolds, “How Biomedical Technologies Harm Patients as Knowers,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.
Joel Michael Reynolds, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know about Disability,” AMA Journal of Ethics 20(12): E1182-1188
Joel Michael Reynolds, “The Extended Body: On Aging, Disability, and Well-Being,” The Hastings Center Report 48(S3): S31-36
Joel Michael Reynolds, “Toward a Critical Theory of Harm: Ableism, Normativity, and Transability (BIID),” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine 2016; 16(1): 37-45.
Joel Michael Reynolds, “Infinite Responsibility in the Bedpan: Response Ethics, Care Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Dependency Work,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 2016; 31(4): 779-94. DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12292, 2016.
Joel Michael Reynolds, “The Ableism of Quality of Life Judgments in Disorders of Consciousness: Who Bears Epistemic Responsibility?” American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 2016; 7(1): 59-61. DOI:10.1080/21507740.2016.1150911.
You can also follow Dr. Reynolds on PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, SSRN, and his personal website.
Posts by Joel Michael Reynolds
- Bioethics Forum Essay
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation
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Three Ethical Reasons for Vaccinating your Children
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Related Posts
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We Belong To One Another: Disability and Family Making
Read the PostPageAbleism frames disability as a “family problem,” in which disability is a tragedy for nondisabled family members and a disqualifying factor when disabled people want to build families of their own. But, to the contrary, disability can create new opportunities for flourishing by challenging tradi...Read the Post - Page
Webinars
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Enjoying: Disability as a Creative Force
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Read the PostShould cure be the ultimate aim of health care? Sometimes aiming at cure entails trying to fix disability rather than enabling disabled people to flourish. Sometimes it obscures the goal of healing. And sometimes aiming at cure entails failing to distinguish between disease and difference. In this we...Read the Post- Page
Questioning Cure: Disability, Identity, and Healing
Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Artistic Visions for Disrupting Ableism
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWhat will it take to bring about lasting justice for disabled people in the United States? When will every body—and every voice—be indispensable? Poets and activists Lateef McLeod and D.J. Savarese explored their ideas in “Disrupting Ableism with Artful Activism,” a virtu...Read the Post - Page
Disrupting Ableism with Artful Activism
Read the PostPagePart 3 of our online event series, “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability,” took place on December 7, 2020 at 3pm EST. What will it take to bring about lasting justice for disabled people in the United States? When will every body—and every voice—be indispensable? P...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
What Does It Mean to Move Through the World with a Disability?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe answer to that question is not straightforward, as was made vivid in “Navigating: On Disability, Technology, and Experiencing the World,” a recent virtual event. It was the second in a series of events produced by The Hastings Center and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities...Read the Post - Page
For “All of Us”? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge
Read the PostPageThis collection of essays is the first written product of The Hastings Center’s Initiative in Bioethics and the Humanities. This new initiative, which we created with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donors, has three aims. The first is to bring toget...Read the Post