From “She Would Say That, Wouldn't She?” to “Does She Take Sugar?” Epistemic Injustice and Disability

Epistemic injustice is the idea that social power ensures that the knowledge of some groups is excluded from the collective epistemic resources. In this paper, I argue that there are distinctive features of disabled life that, because they shape the processes through which knowledge is gathered, evaluated, judged, and disseminated, also influence the ways in which epistemic injustice is experienced by disabled people. These features include the ascription of a global epistemic incapacity to people affected by impairment. Against a background of contemporary political shifts and biotechnology innovation, the implications of epistemic injustice for disabled people are serious.