JOEL MICHAEL REYNOLDS, “WE ARE ALL SOMEBODY’S CHILD: DISABILITY, SPECIESISM, AND THE PROBLEM OF DEHUMANIZATION”

Feb. 25 (Thurs.), 3:00-4:00: Joel Michael Reynolds (Asst. Prof. Philosophy, Georgetown) presents as part of our series, Stories for Survivability: How we Talk about Disability Ethics and Why it Matters

—> Zoom Registration: https://uncc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvd–gqjgsEteZLJ5dlRoWfcoD72UEL852

Reynolds’ work explores the relationship between bodies, values, and society, and 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.  He is the author of The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and the History of Morality (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press), The Meaning of Disability (under contract with Oxford University Press), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (under contract with Polity). He is the co-editor of The Disability Bioethics Reader (forthcoming with Routledge) with Christine Wieseler and of a special issue of The Hastings Center Report, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge,” with Erik Parens.

About the series: Even as disability has many meanings and contexts, narratives about disability are often narrow, reducing to celebrations of individual heroism or laments about lost experiences.  These reductive stories fail to do justice either to the experiences of disabled individuals or the structural conditions of their lives.  But if stories about disability can narrow our understanding, they can also expand them, creating strategies both to imagine this world and to move toward a more just one. Join us for a series of conversations about the stories we tell about disability, and how constructing new, overlapping stories helps us to imagine a more inclusive, survivable world.  Last semester’s conversation with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is available on the Center’s YouTube Channel, and future talks in the series feature Ashley Shew (March 16) and Kim Q. Hall (April 15).