Knowledge Citizens? Intellectual Disability and the Production of Social Meanings Within Educational Research

Intellectual disability may appear to many as a barrier to participation in or the production of educational research. Indeed, a common perception of individuals seen as having cognitive impairments, and especially those with minimal or no verbal communication, is that they are incapable of the reasoning or lack the deliberative capacities necessary to participate in research or policy-influencing decision making. In this essay, Ashley Taylor dismantles these assumptions, challenging both the view of intellectual disability on which they rest and the view of epistemic competence they imply. Taylor shows how the absence or exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities labels from dominant knowledge-making institutions and arenas, including within educational research, amounts to injustice and results in their tacit or overt exclusion from civic education and political membership.