We study alternatives to guardianship and substitute decision-making for people with cognitive disabilities. Supported decision-making models let people keep legal authority over their own choices while relying on trusted others for help understanding options and communicating preferences. Our work asks what autonomy looks like when it is exercised relationally, and what law, policy, and clinical practice owe to people who make decisions with support rather than alone. We integrate the needs and perspective of supporters, too, as we take care-taking seriously.

Our current empirical research examines what clinicians need in order to provide good care to patients with cognitive disabilities, and where current training and systems fall short. This work includes an ongoing survey of clinician attitudes and a qualitative study of caregivers' experiences, conducted with student researchers, that brings the perspective of those who navigate care alongside disabled people.

We also research augmentative and alternative communication, the tools and practices (from picture boards to speech-generating devices) used by people who cannot rely on speech alone. Our systematic review of the advances in AAC (under review) connects to our broader interests in how we recognize and respond to people who communicate in nonstandard ways.

With Ian Peebles, PhD, we are developing a virtue-theoretic approach to clinical education, asking which character traits clinicians need and how training programs can cultivate them, rather than focusing solely on rules and procedures. We thing that habituation and practical reasoning are key components of good clinical behavior that will promote equitable health outcomes for historically minoritized patient groups while simultaneously mitigating clinician burnou.

In her monograph project, Love Without Language, Peabody Smith proposes a new account of what grounds moral status: the capacity to develop and deploy relationally-indexed expressions, meaningful expressions that are both shaped by and shaping the relationships in which they occur. The account takes people with intellectual disabilities as a central case and extends to nonhuman animals.

We use phenomenological methods, which start from the lived, first-person experience of illness, to study mental health and illness. With Ellie Anderson, PhD, Peabody Smith is editing a volume that brings together scholars from philosophy, public health, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, data science, and technology studies. The volume examines how mental illnesses are classified, the role of narrative, memoir, and testimony in understanding them, the possibility of well-being within mental illness, and approaches that move beyond the framework of psychopathology.

Peabody Smith’s work in philosophy of disability centers disabled people's own testimony and asks how non-disabled assumptions shape ethics, medicine, and public life. Her article "Piss on Pity?" (Passion, 2026) examines whether pity and compassion toward disabled people are morally appropriate. She is writing Disability Ethics: The Basics (Routledge: 2028), an interdisciplinary introduction to the field that covers models of disability, the history of disability justice and its influence on law and policy, debates in disability bioethics, and the representation of disability in media and popular culture.