Intellectual Disability and Epistemic Justice in Journalism: Reflections from A Pilot Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reflects on a pilot project conducted in partnership between a disability studies scholar and several journalistic organizations to produce investigative news that is accessible to and inclusive of sources and readers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). We situate the project against the theoretical backdrop of epistemic injustice, arguing that access to information is key for shifting public discourse that has historically disenfranchised disabled people. We then summarize the pilot project, which focused on a series of investigative reports about disability services in the southwest United States. The project engaged communities with IDD using three core methods. First, the production of the series itself intentionally centered perspectives of people with IDD in favor of family members, professional caregivers, or other experts, whose perspectives have historically dominated news coverage of disability. Next, the team produced two public events that centered disabled perspectives, including a public storytelling event and an event presenting the investigation’s findings and production in order to solicit feedback from targeted communities. Finally, we provided multiple modes of engagement with the stories themselves, including plain language and Spanish translations, and audio recordings. We close by reflecting on lessons and limitations of this project, as well as next steps in both research and practice. Ultimately, we conclude that cognitive accessibility is necessary but not sufficient, calling for the explicit inclusion of disabled people, particularly people with IDD, in newsrooms and journalistic practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.126 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".