Epistemology from Disability, Epistemology of Disability

The article aims to explore in which terms disability represents a resource of knowledge, both in the personal and scientific domains. Specifically, the intertwinement of these two domains is conveyed by the reference to the recent concept of ‘cripistemology’. In the first section, I will explain why this analysis is needed, pointing out that disabled people are routinely dispossessed of knowledge and victims of epistemic injustice and exclusion. I will consider how social epistemology has largely ignored disability, even though it is used as a prosthetic rhetoric device in a part of this literature. I will examine how often disabled people are deemed incompetent, and more specifically two cases in which they are not regarded as epistemic authorities on their own experience of disability: when speaking about their well-being and when participating in medical exchanges. I will then address hermeneutical injustice on disability, mainly focusing on the scarce diffusion of the concept of ‘ableism’ – an essential political and sociocultural epistemic resource. I will also identify cases of material epistemic exclusion: in particular, how segregation and isolation significantly harm disabled people. In the second section, I will consider two forms of epistemic reparation or resistance. Firstly, I will examine the epistemic standpoint of disability, considering how experience leads to specific personal expertise in creating access, orienting technoscience, and managing pain. Secondly, I will consider disability as an epistemological standpoint, examining how it can positively impact the critical analyses of it conducted by disability studies. In this regard, I will identify disabled people’s position as ‘epistemological susceptibility’. Namely, disabled scholars do possibly have an epistemic privilege, but further factors elicited specifically by the category of disability must be addressed.