Disability, Epistemology, Sciencing

Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces scientific knowledge. The introduction to this volume of Osiris announces a disability history of science, placing disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond the paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, we further propose a scientific management model of disability to account for the shaping of disabled lives and relations by the applied sciences, from the ancient world to the present.