Kelsey G Reeder

Kelsey G Reeder, LCSW-R (they/she) is a Clinical Social Worker, Advanced Practice PhD Candidate, and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University School of Social Work, and Senior Teaching Consultant in Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Kelsey has worked in therapeutic foster care, school social work, and community mental health. With post-graduate training from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, they maintain a therapy and supervision practice focused on relationship challenges, family conflict, religious trauma, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience. Kelsey spent six years providing clinical supervision to Lifeline counselors supporting LGBTQ+ youth experiencing crisis or suicidality, and has been a member of the GALAP Network since 2017, writing free gender-affirming surgery letters. 

Kelsey’s research aims to subvert social work education and practice through queer irreverence and mess, examining care, social work, and institutional power through queer and trans, abolitionist, disability justice, and anti-colonial lenses. Kelsey’s work explores how community-based and institutional forms of care contribute to or disrupt collective queer and trans liberation, and how social work is taught and practiced in ways that position social workers as sites of social control within their own communities. As a recipient of Disability, Columbia Presidential, and GADE Teaching Awards, teaching is among Kelsey’s greatest passions. Her aforementioned practice experience and research inform her classroom pedagogy, which centers care, multidirectional learning (and healing), and wisdom birthed in the margins.

As a 2026-2027 Incite Institute Dissertation Fellow, Kelsey is currently completing their dissertation, Conceptualizing & Queering Care within and Beyond (Social Work) Institutions:

Have you ever felt critical of something you also depended on? Maybe a school, parent, healthcare provider, or workplace—relationships from which, despite profound disagreement, we cannot simply walk away. As anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and authoritarian politics intensify, LGBTQIA+ social service organizations have become increasingly vital infrastructures of survival. Yet such nonprofits have faced central contradictions that long predate the current political moment. Professionalization and liability culture have governed queer and trans care, often sidelining mutual aid and other anti-carceral, non-pathologizing collective traditions that sustained communities long before institutions claimed responsibility for their care. So how do queer and trans care workers navigate institutions that are both infrastructures of survival and constraint? Working in co-researchship with queer and trans care workers across LGBTQIA+-specific organizations in New York City, Kelsey explores how they navigate these enduring contradictions, including how they draw on community-based care values to negotiate, resist, and reimagine institutional care.