Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program, a Senior Research Scholar in The Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, and a Faculty Scholar of the Greenwall Foundation (Class of 2025). He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society.
At the broadest level, Reynolds’ work explores the relationship between bodies, values, and society. 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. These concerns lead to research across a range of traditions and specialties, including philosophy of disability, applied ethics (especially biomedical ethics, public health, and ELSI research in genomics), European and American philosophy (with an emphasis on phenomenology and pragmatism as practiced in connection with history of philosophy), and social epistemology (particularly issues of epistemic injustice as linked to social ontology).
Reynolds is the author or editor of five books, including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, 2022; co-edited with Christine Wieseler), Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (forthcoming 2024 with Polity), and The Meaning of Disability (forthcoming 2024 with Oxford University Press). In 2020, he co-edited a special issue of The Hastings Center Report entitled, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge." He is author or co-author of over three dozen journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, and his current research includes a number of article-length studies as well as invited pieces for Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling, and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism.
His public philosophy has been featured in TIME, AEON, HuffPost, The Conversation, Health Progress, and in a Tedx talk. Reynolds regularly speaks with medical students and practitioners across specialties concerning how to improve the quality and equity of care for patients with disabilities, including recent talks at the schools of medicine at Yale, Harvard, and UCLA based on his AMA Journal of Ethics piece, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability.” See https://www.joelreynolds.me for more information.
