Cognitive Diversity in the Global Academy: Why the Voices of Persons with Cognitive Disabilities are Vital to Intellectual Diversity

In asking scholars to reflect on the “structures and practices of academic knowledge that render alternative knowledge traditions irrelevant and invisible,” as well as on the ways these must change for the academy to cease “functioning as an instrument of westernization rather than as an authentically global and diverse intellectual commons,” the editor of this special issue of the Journal of Academic Ethics is envisaging a world much needed and much resisted. A great deal of the conversation about diversity in higher education emphasizes, rightly, the need for an international and ethnically diverse population of scholars and students. Less attention is paid to the value of cognitive diversity—the diversity of cognition generated by cognitive disabilities. As one aspect of intellectual diversity, cognitive diversity promises novel ways of thinking and new understandings of what knowledge is, who makes it, and how it is made. The unique value of cognitive diversity is its insistence on a radical shift in our conception of who can know and who can produce knowledge. Insisting on the inclusion, as scholars, of persons with minds labelled disabled, an epistemology of disability pushes us to reform the much criticized but still dominant notion of the expert and scholar as able-bodied and hyper-rational.