Joel Michael Reynolds
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587404 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Michael Reynolds |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Reynolds |
| SIGNATURE | REYNOLDS J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9640-5082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Not what it seems: Distributed agencies and clinical narratives in electronic health records
Medical records mediate clinical work at multiple levels. Focusing on the transition from paper-based medical records to Electronic Health Records (EHRs), we analyze how the incorporation of digital infrastructures reconfigures healthcare networks and reshapes practices of writing, reading, and narration. Our analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted between 2024 and 2025 in two psychiatric settings in southwestern Colombia. We trace how …
Introduction to Volume 5
Progressive Reckonings, Indigenous Feminist Praxis, and Resisting the Common Roots of Reproductive and Climate Injustice
White progressives in the United States are currently experiencing two profound reckonings that typically are assumed to be unrelated. On one hand, the Dobbs verdict overturned the assumption that the right to choose with respect to abortion is too socially entrenched, juridically settled, or politically sacred to be denied. On the other hand, climatological conditions for possibly having a comfortable existence are increasingly under threat in l…
Introduction to Volume 4
National Institutes of Health Designates Disabled People a Health Disparity Population
This Viewpoint examines watershed moments in improving health care for people with disabilities in the US
Roots of Access: Un-Lock(e)ing Coalitions for Indigenous Futures and Disability Justice
State violence against disabled people and Indigenous people as well as disabled Indigenous people has long been endemic in the US. Recent scholarship in philosophy of disability and disability studies rarely addresses the underlying issue that causes such state violence: settler-colonial conceptions of land. The aim of this article is to begin filling this gap in the literature. We detail settler colonial epistemologies and argue that the proper…
Introduction to Volume 3
Louisiana's “Medically Futile” Unborn Child List: Ethical Lessons at the Post‐ Dobbs Intersection of Reproductive and Disability Justice
Ableist attitudes and structures are increasingly recognized across all sectors of health care delivery. After Dobbs, novel questions arose in the United States concerning how to protect reproductive autonomy while avoiding discrimination against and devaluation of disabled persons. In this essay, we examine the Louisiana Department of Health's emergency declaration, “List of Conditions That Shall Deem an Unborn Child ‘Medically Futile,’” issued …
The New Hysteria: Borderline Personality Disorder and Epistemic Injustice
The diagnostic category of borderline personality disorder (BPD) has come under increasing criticism in recent years. In this paper, we analyze the role and impact of epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial injustice, in relation to the diagnosis of BPD. We first offer a critical sociological and historical account, detailing and expanding a range of arguments that BPD is problematic nosologically. We then turn to explore the epistemic inju…
The Normate: On Disability, Critical Phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne
In the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt”, Merleau-Ponty explores the relationship between Paul Cézanne’s art and his embodiment. The doubt in question is ultimately about the meaning of Cézanne’s art in light of his disabilities. Should his disabilities or impairments shape how we interpret his art or should they instead be treated as incidental, as mere biographical data? Although Merleau-Ponty’s essay isn’t intended to be phenomenological, its line of qu…
Disability and White Supremacy
It is widely known that Black Americans are significantly more likely to be killed by the police in the United States than white Americans. What is less widely known is that nearly half of all people killed by the police are people with disabilities. The aim of this article is to better understand the intersection of racism and ableism in the United States. Contributing to the growing literature at the intersection of philosophy of disability and…
Introducing the Journal of Philosophy of Disability
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation—Addendum
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation
The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone’s personal ventilator is a direct assault …
Moving through capacity space: Mapping disability and enhancement
In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to (1) a wide range of cases, and (2) the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases…
The Carcerality of Ability
“Madness and criminality,” Michael Rembis writes, “are called into being.” If, as his analysis demonstrates, madness and criminality must be thought together—if ableism is inextricable from racism, sexism, cis-sexism, colonialism, classism, and the many biopolitical apparatuses that join them—then the question of what presents itself to thought as ability, how ability is figured, where ability is sited and situated, and who represents it is a que…
Genopower: On Genomics, Disability, and Impairment
Since the completion of the human genome project in 2003, genomic sequencing, analysis, and interpretation have become staples of research in medicine and the life sciences more generally. While much scholarly ink has been spilled concerning genomics' precipitous rise, there is little agreement concerning its meaning, both in general and with respect to the current moment. Some claim genomics is neither new nor noteworthy; others claim it is a no…
Disability and the problem of suffering
I am grateful to Philip Reed for his article ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’. His piece compellingly demonstrates the import of expanding analyses concerning the expressivist thesis beyond the reproductive sphere to the end-of-life sphere. I hope that his intervention spurns further work on this connection. In what follows, I want to focus on what I take to be moments of slippage in his use of the concept of disability, a slippage…
“What if There's Something Wrong with Her?”‐How Biomedical Technologies Contribute to Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare
While there is a steadily growing literature on epistemic injustice in healthcare, there are few discussions of the role that biomedical technologies play in harming patients in their capacity as knowers. Through an analysis of newborn and pediatric genetic and genomic sequencing technologies (GSTs), I argue that biomedical technologies can lead to epistemic injustice through two primary pathways: epistemic capture and value partitioning . I clos…
Disability Rights as a Necessary Framework for Crisis Standards of Care and the Future of Health Care
In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule …
Health for Whom? Bioethics and the Challenge of Justice for Genomic Medicine
The guiding premise from which this special report begins is the conviction and hope that justice is at the normative heart of medicine and that it is the perpetual task of bioethics to bring concerns of justice to bear on medical practice. On such an account, justice is medicine's lifeblood, that by which it contributes to life as opposed to diminishing it. It is in this larger, historical, intersectional, critical, and ethically minded context …
The Meaning of Ability and Disability
I argue that the foundational question of continental philosophy of disability is the question of the meaning of ability. Engaging a range of canonical texts across the Western intellectual tradition, I explore three hermeneutic pathways toward this question, concluding with a discussion of its larger sociopolitical and philosophical stakes.
The Extended Body: On Aging, Disability, and Well‐being
Insofar as many older adults fit some definition of disability, disability studies and gerontology would seem to have common interests and goals. However, there has been little discussion between these fields. The aim of this paper is to open up the insights of disability studies as well as philosophy of disability to discussions in gerontology. In doing so, I hope to contribute to thinking about the good life in late life by more critically refl…
Bioethics as care work
German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that humans are defined by care. The term he used , “Sorge,” picks out a wide range of caring relations, including sorrow, worry, the making of arrangements, and even fending for another. Since coming to The Hastings Center, I've been struck by the genuine care definitive of its scholars’ relationship to their work. Care about newborns, the elderly, and nonhuman animals. Care about doctors, nurses, and h…
Infotality: On Living, Loving, and Dying Through Information
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Infinite Responsibility in the Bedpan: Response Ethics, Care Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Dependency Work
Because Levinas understands ethical response as a response to the radical alterity of the other, he contrasts it with justice, for which alterity becomes a question of equality. Drawing upon the practice of dependency work and the insights of feminist care ethics, I argue that the opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity‐based principles is belied in the experience of care. Through a hermeneutic phenomenol…
“I’d rather be dead than disabled”—the ableist conflation and the meanings of disability
Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disabilit…
Being Better Bodies
Bioethics has an uneasy relationship with embodiment. Only with vigilance does knowledge of the body as it is lived counterbalance the momentous inertia of knowledge of the body as an object brought about by modern medical sciences. As a field tethered to detached, technical ways of knowing the world, bioethics must toil to treat the body as more than mere material and machine. To be more is, among other things, to be social—to live in the thicke…
The Extended Body: On Aging, Disability, and Well‐being
Insofar as many older adults fit some definition of disability, disability studies and gerontology would seem to have common interests and goals. However, there has been little discussion between these fields. The aim of this paper is to open up the insights of disability studies as well as philosophy of disability to discussions in gerontology. In doing so, I hope to contribute to thinking about the good life in late life by more critically refl…
Bioethics as care work
German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that humans are defined by care. The term he used , “Sorge,” picks out a wide range of caring relations, including sorrow, worry, the making of arrangements, and even fending for another. Since coming to The Hastings Center, I've been struck by the genuine care definitive of its scholars’ relationship to their work. Care about newborns, the elderly, and nonhuman animals. Care about doctors, nurses, and h…
Infotality: On Living, Loving, and Dying Through Information
Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability
The historical relationship between health care professionals and people with disabilities is fraught, a fact all the more troubling in light of the distinctive roles clinicians play in both establishing and responding to that which is considered normal or abnormal by society at large. Those who wish to improve their clinical practice might struggle, however, to keep up with developments across numerous disability communities as well as the ever-…
The Meaning of Ability and Disability
I argue that the foundational question of continental philosophy of disability is the question of the meaning of ability. Engaging a range of canonical texts across the Western intellectual tradition, I explore three hermeneutic pathways toward this question, concluding with a discussion of its larger sociopolitical and philosophical stakes.
Disability and the problem of suffering
I am grateful to Philip Reed for his article ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’. His piece compellingly demonstrates the import of expanding analyses concerning the expressivist thesis beyond the reproductive sphere to the end-of-life sphere. I hope that his intervention spurns further work on this connection. In what follows, I want to focus on what I take to be moments of slippage in his use of the concept of disability, a slippage…
“What if There's Something Wrong with Her?”‐How Biomedical Technologies Contribute to Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare
While there is a steadily growing literature on epistemic injustice in healthcare, there are few discussions of the role that biomedical technologies play in harming patients in their capacity as knowers. Through an analysis of newborn and pediatric genetic and genomic sequencing technologies (GSTs), I argue that biomedical technologies can lead to epistemic injustice through two primary pathways: epistemic capture and value partitioning . I clos…
Disability Rights as a Necessary Framework for Crisis Standards of Care and the Future of Health Care
In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule …
Health for Whom? Bioethics and the Challenge of Justice for Genomic Medicine
The guiding premise from which this special report begins is the conviction and hope that justice is at the normative heart of medicine and that it is the perpetual task of bioethics to bring concerns of justice to bear on medical practice. On such an account, justice is medicine's lifeblood, that by which it contributes to life as opposed to diminishing it. It is in this larger, historical, intersectional, critical, and ethically minded context …
Introducing the Journal of Philosophy of Disability
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation—Addendum
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation
The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone’s personal ventilator is a direct assault …
Moving through capacity space: Mapping disability and enhancement
In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to (1) a wide range of cases, and (2) the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases…
The Carcerality of Ability
“Madness and criminality,” Michael Rembis writes, “are called into being.” If, as his analysis demonstrates, madness and criminality must be thought together—if ableism is inextricable from racism, sexism, cis-sexism, colonialism, classism, and the many biopolitical apparatuses that join them—then the question of what presents itself to thought as ability, how ability is figured, where ability is sited and situated, and who represents it is a que…
Genopower: On Genomics, Disability, and Impairment
Since the completion of the human genome project in 2003, genomic sequencing, analysis, and interpretation have become staples of research in medicine and the life sciences more generally. While much scholarly ink has been spilled concerning genomics' precipitous rise, there is little agreement concerning its meaning, both in general and with respect to the current moment. Some claim genomics is neither new nor noteworthy; others claim it is a no…
The Normate: On Disability, Critical Phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne
In the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt”, Merleau-Ponty explores the relationship between Paul Cézanne’s art and his embodiment. The doubt in question is ultimately about the meaning of Cézanne’s art in light of his disabilities. Should his disabilities or impairments shape how we interpret his art or should they instead be treated as incidental, as mere biographical data? Although Merleau-Ponty’s essay isn’t intended to be phenomenological, its line of qu…
Disability and White Supremacy
It is widely known that Black Americans are significantly more likely to be killed by the police in the United States than white Americans. What is less widely known is that nearly half of all people killed by the police are people with disabilities. The aim of this article is to better understand the intersection of racism and ableism in the United States. Contributing to the growing literature at the intersection of philosophy of disability and…
Introduction to Volume 3
Louisiana's “Medically Futile” Unborn Child List: Ethical Lessons at the Post‐ Dobbs Intersection of Reproductive and Disability Justice
Ableist attitudes and structures are increasingly recognized across all sectors of health care delivery. After Dobbs, novel questions arose in the United States concerning how to protect reproductive autonomy while avoiding discrimination against and devaluation of disabled persons. In this essay, we examine the Louisiana Department of Health's emergency declaration, “List of Conditions That Shall Deem an Unborn Child ‘Medically Futile,’” issued …
The New Hysteria: Borderline Personality Disorder and Epistemic Injustice
The diagnostic category of borderline personality disorder (BPD) has come under increasing criticism in recent years. In this paper, we analyze the role and impact of epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial injustice, in relation to the diagnosis of BPD. We first offer a critical sociological and historical account, detailing and expanding a range of arguments that BPD is problematic nosologically. We then turn to explore the epistemic inju…
Introduction to Volume 4
National Institutes of Health Designates Disabled People a Health Disparity Population
This Viewpoint examines watershed moments in improving health care for people with disabilities in the US
Sociology (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Economic Justice (5 works)