Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to and Fellow of The Hastings Center, and Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation. At Georgetown, they are also core faculty in the Disability Studies Program, affiliated faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative, faculty fellow of Ethics Lab, and director of graduate placement in the Department of Philosophy. They are the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press.
At the broadest level, Reynolds’ work centers on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and embodiment. They are especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of disabled people and the justness of practices in medicine, science, politics, and law. Seeking to bring reflective and empirical insights together, their research spans the humanities and social sciences, with a special emphasis on the role and import of lived experience.
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). They are author or co-author of over fifty journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly commentaries, and their current research includes a number of article-length studies as well as books chapters for Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, and The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling.
Their public philosophy has been featured in TIME, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Bioethics Forum, and in a Tedx talk. Based on their 2018 AMA Journal of Ethics article, "Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability," Dr. Reynolds regularly speaks with and consults for medical educators 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, Tufts, University of Washington, and UCLA, and for grand rounds and keynotes in the USA and Canada, including Brown University's Department of Emergency Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Parkland Health & Hospital System, University of Texas Medical Branch, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Horizon Health Network. An internationally recognized expert on disability bioethics, they have given more than one hundred lectures, keynote addresses, and conference talks across the globe, including recent and upcoming talks at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Lyon (France), University of Basel (Switzerland), Universidad de La Salle (Columbia), University of Warsaw (Poland), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), Deakin University (Australia), and Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada). See https://www.joelreynolds.me for more information.
