I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the 2017-19 Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center.
My work centers on the relationship between bodies, values, and society, and its effects on wellbeing. I am especially concerned with the meaning of disability and the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of social institutions ranging from medicine to politics. Towards this aim, my research is carried out at the intersection of bioethics, philosophy of disability, social epistemology, and 19th-20th century American and European philosophy (esp. phenomenology). I also draw heavily from feminist philosophy (esp. care ethics), philosophy of medicine, and the health humanities.
I am the author of Ethics After Ableism: Disability, Pain, and the History of Morality, forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. With Christine Wieseler, I am co-editor of The Disability Bioethics Reader, under contract with Routledge. It is the first general introduction to bioethics that centers the lives of people with disabilities and is grounded in research from critical disability studies and philosophy of disability. I am also co-editor, with Erik Parens, of a forthcoming special issue of The Hastings Center Report on “The Gift and Weight of Genomic Knowledge." I am working on two book projects: one on the meaning of ability and another on the practice and promise of care. Other ongoing projects include studies on the intersection of hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative medicine, epistemic injustice and ableism, care ethics and the “duty to know,” the history of modern medicine and bioethics, disability-related ELSI research in genomics, and the role of epistemologies of ignorance in healthcare delivery.
Articles and commentaries mine can be found in the American Journal of Bioethics, The Hastings Center Report, AMA Journal of Ethics, Hypatia, Levinas Studies, Chiasmi International, The Review of Communication, and Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine. Book chapters of mine have or will be appearing in volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling, 50 Concepts for an Intersectional Phenomenology, Philosophy of Disability: New Perspectives, Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics, and Disability and American Philosophy. My public philosophy has been featured in TIME, HuffPost, AEON, The Conversation, and in a Tedx talk. Please see my website (joelreynolds.me) for more information.
