Prioritising the knowledge of disabled people
By Sarah Bell
In July, we published a new paper in the journal, ‘GEO: Geography and Environment’, called “A Case of Epistemic Injustice: Prioritising Disability Knowledges in Climate Adaptation”.
The paper started out as a blog post in 2023 for the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School. We then developed the ideas further for an online lecture at the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Disability Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.
In the paper, we draw on our work in both Bristol and Glasgow to highlight how the failure to embed and learn from the expertise of disabled people in climate adaptation is a form of ‘epistemic injustice’; that is, it is a type of injustice that causes harm to disabled people by not recognising or respecting their knowledge.
Introducing epistemic injustice
Epistemic injustice can occur when a listener dismisses the knowledge contributions of a speaker because of their own prejudices; this is a form of testimonial injustice. The cumulative effects of being dismissed in this way can result in testimonial smothering, whereby the speaker withdraws from such situations altogether; either through an expectation of being overlooked or through losing confidence in their own knowledge.
Testimonial injustice can lead to hermeneutical injustice when individuals are repeatedly denied meaningful opportunities to develop terms or concepts to express their experiences in ways that are recognised or respected.
When people are dismissed in this way and/or when their knowledge gets misused, they may refuse to engage altogether, choosing silence for self-protection and stepping away from seemingly fruitless efforts to educate people who are unwilling to listen. Such resistance perhaps reflects what disability scholar, J. Logan Smilges, describes as a ‘life strike’;
“We can collectively negotiate refusal. Both one at a time and all together, we insist that we are not doing this anymore. We will not take part. We will not give more of ourselves. We refuse the access we've been given. It is not enough; it is too late; it is to a room we don't want to occupy”.
The emphasis in society on knowledge that can be communicated and documented in words is also a form of injustice; that of expressive hermeneutical injustice. It suggests the problem lies with people who do not use words to communicate, rather than with the people who do not know how to listen to knowledge that is shared via touch, body language, facial expressions or gestures, for example.
When testimonial or hermeneutical injustice happen, we lose important ways of understanding and making sense of the world, both as it is now and as the climate changes.
Five conditions of epistemic injustice
In the paper, we reflect on five conditions set out by Byskov and Hyams (2022), to demonstrate how the exclusion of disabled people from the development of climate adaptation knowledge, policy and practice is a form of epistemic injustice.
The stakeholder condition: disabled people are disproportionately affected by the climate harms that decision-makers are seeking to reduce through climate adaptation. Our research in Bristol and Glasgow has highlighted many risks experienced by disabled people in the face of more frequent floods and heat waves, as well as more subtle changes in, for example, surface water levels and temperature that may seem relatively unremarkable to others. Such shifts have direct health impacts (with heat, e.g., increasing the risk of seizures and other adverse symptoms), as well as limiting mobility through compromising the efficacy of assistive devices.
The socio-economic condition: adverse climate impacts filter through existing situations of socio-economic disadvantage that reduce the capacity of many disabled people (e.g., resources, energy) to adapt or reduce climate harm. For example, participants in both case study cities highlighted the challenges of having poorly adapted housing in the face of climate change, and the increasing issue of having to choose between heating, cooling or eating in the current political and economic climate.
The prejudice condition: prejudiced, stereotypical ideas about the capacities of disabled people continue to undermine the ways in which disability knowledges are recognised or embedded within climate change policy/practice. As discussed in the paper, decisions about whose knowledge is deemed ‘worthy’ interweave with judgements about whose lives are so valued.
Participants highlighted how the austerity agenda, government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis have reinforced longstanding inequalities in the value given to disabled people's lives in ways that undermine the safety and material conditions needed to participate in and contribute to climate adaptation. Some felt that when they express their anger about these responses, or their frustration of being repeatedly ignored, they are further dismissed, reflecting a form of expressive hermeneutical injustice.
The disadvantage condition: the continued exclusion of disabled people from climate responses, in turn, creates new socio-economic disadvantages. For example, measures implemented to reduce carbon emissions can impact disproportionately on disabled people, such as the introduction of Clean Air Zones. While these may reduce air pollution and the risk of respiratory illness, cars with more efficient technology and adaptive cycles can be prohibitively expensive for disabled people, who often already experience disabling barriers to employment and income generation. Without providing suitable transport alternatives, the introduction of such zones in urban centres reflects a form of eco-ableism, creating new disabling barriers to employment, health care and other key forms of societal participation.
The epistemic condition: this final condition of epistemic injustice refers to the knowledge held by many disabled communities that could significantly improve climate adaptation efforts. The climate crisis is asking many of us to cope with and adapt to increasingly unpredictable, harmful everyday environments. As highlighted by our participants (and by many disability activists and researchers), disabled people often have to develop the resourcefulness, skills and creativity to navigate uncertainty in a world that has not been built with disabled people in mind. These skills can be under-developed in people who ‘fit’ smoothly into the world and are much needed in responses to climate change.
Whether a person is disabled now or becomes disabled later, society must meet everyone's needs. Given the inevitability of significant societal change with climate breakdown, it is essential that collective responses are configured towards the creation of socially just societies in which everyone's existence and needs are valued.
The full paper is available to read and download online.