I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and 2017-20 Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center. I am also currently the co-director of a 2-year NEH Public Humanities grant project: The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology.
At the broadest level, my work investigates the relationship between bodies, values, and society. 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 institutions ranging from medicine to politics. Towards this aim and with a strong commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, my research occurs at the intersection of bioethics, philosophy of disability, social epistemology, and 19th-20th c. Continental and American philosophy (esp. phenomenology and neopragmatism). Though I draw upon multiple traditions and literatures, all of my work is centrally informed by feminist philosophy (esp. care ethics).
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: “For All of Us? On The Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” In addition to a series of articles, my current research is building towards two book-length projects: one on the meaning of ability (currently entitled Ability Trouble) and another exploring the phenomenological and political dimensions of care (currently entitled Politics After Ableism: The Promise of Care). Other ongoing work includes studies on the intersection of hermeneutic phenomenology, narrative medicine, and clinical practice, ableism as a form of epistemic injustice, 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, KIEJ, 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, The New York Times (this fall), HuffPost, AEON, and in a Tedx talk. I am also a regular contributor to the researcher-led news outlet The Conversation. Please see my website (https://www.joelreynolds.me) for more information.
