Challenging Epistemic Injustices in Swedish Adult Education as Ethical Issues

Introduction

Theorizing Epistemic (In)justice in Education and Aim of Study

From the perspective of educational philosophy, Nikolaidis (2023) argues that an over-emphasis on individual epistemic agency has often obscured the structural dimensions of epistemic injustice in education (Reynolds and Timpe 2025; Thoutenhoofd, Adams Lyngbäck, and Lindahl 2024). Consequently, Nikolaidis’ (2023, 844) model highlights the interconnectedness of individual and collective agency within institutional-structural processes. In this paper, we address these structural aspects through the lens of educational rights—or the lack thereof—for adult learners with ID. Crucially, we examine this by focusing on teachers as agents who actively identify and respond to these injustices as inherently structural.

Nikolaidis’ (2023) theorizing of epistemic injustice in education integrates both structural and ‘remedy’ approaches. This model views educational institutions as fundamentally rigid in their foundational structure, but also encompassing dynamic social-structural processes. Importantly, the model highlights that harmful epistemological orientations serve as the foundational pillars that sustain these injustices.

The three structural approaches suggest that (1) educational institutions should ‘distribute epistemic goods fairly’; (2) institutional processes may both ‘enable and constrain individual action’; and (3) ‘basic educational structure is epistemically unjust because it is guided by a wrongful and harmful epistemological orientation’ (Nikolaidis 2023, 853). Correspondingly, the three remedy approaches include (1) reorganizing educational structures; (2) individually and collectively disrupting unjust educational-structural processes; and (3) transforming harmful epistemological orientation through epistemic activism (Nikolaidis 2023, 853). Drawing on Medina and Whitt (2021, 309), epistemic activism refers to ‘transgressive forms of epistemic interaction that call attention to and potentially disrupt contexts, intercontextual relations, and patterns of interaction that contribute to epistemic injustice’ (Nikolaidis 2023, 855; Nikolaidis 2025; see also Dotson 2018).

Informed by Nikolaidis’ theorizing of epistemic injustice as multilayered, we ask how structural realities limiting educational rights are identified and acted upon as epistemic injustices from a teacher’s perspective. Our findings aim to contribute to current scholarship by highlighting both how educational practices continue to reproduce the marginalization of specific student groups, such as adults labeled with ID, and the vital role of teacher agency in resisting these injustices within such practices.

The Longitudinal Action-based and Linguistic Ethnographic Study

In our longitudinal study, we draw on data from two consecutive projects¹ within adapted adult education. The first project employed an action-oriented approach (see McTaggart, Nixon, and Kemmis 2017) involving teachers from four learning centers. In the second project, one of these centers was revisited, enabling a follow-up of a specific teacher’s practice. Both projects were grounded in linguistic ethnography, focusing on micro-level interactions and their relationship to the wider social and institutional context (Blackledge and Creese 2023).

We entered the fieldwork as white, temporarily able-bodied subjects within the cross-disciplinary fields of Language, Education, and Disability, having prior personal and professional experience from adapted education and non-normative linguistic knowledge. We acknowledge that our production and interpretation of data is contingent upon these interpersonal lived experiences of disability (Adams Lyngbäck 2016) and the ID label (Kittay 2019). Crucially, these experiences allowed us to turn a reflexive lens upon ourselves, recognizing our own limitations in engaging with and communicating through a widened linguistic repertoire (see Hedman et al. 2026c).

In Project 1 (years 2022–2023), two of the four participating learning centers offered subject-area courses to adults labeled with ID.² These courses were taught by our focus teachers, Robi at Redwood Center and Hille at Beech Center.³ During this phase, we observed their courses on Language and Communication,⁴ conducted interviews with teachers and students, and hosted four action research meetings with all participating teachers. We also facilitated group discussions with teachers at each site. In these sessions, the teachers identified and discussed contemporary challenges, which initially centered on concepts such as accessibility and participation. Over time, these discussions evolved into deeper inquiries regarding social and epistemic (in)justice for their students.

In Project 2 (2024–2027), we followed up on teacher Robi’s practice, drawing on interactional data from the course Life Skills, Education, and Health and individual interviews. The curriculum addressed the body, relations, and health, as well as people’s role in nature conservation. Instruction utilized diverse communicative modes, including sign-supported speech. The course met for 2.5 hours weekly, and students could remain enrolled for two or more years, provided they demonstrated progress. The participant group included the students Ina, Jem, Amy, Ruth, and René, as well as a teacher assistant, Mia; notably, several of these students had also participated in Project 1. To ensure ethical transparency, all students were informed about the project through accessible and multimodal communication strategies.⁵

During our fieldwork with Robi’s group, we conducted observations during onsite lessons, breaks, and online sessions (see Table 1 for a summary of the data from both projects). Transcribed audio-visual-data were translated from Swedish to English (see Appendix for original transcripts in Swedish).

The analytical procedure followed a linguistic-ethnographic approach (Copland and Creese 2015) characterized by an analysis that originated in the field through shared experiences, the systematic writing of fieldnotes, and the theoretical lens of epistemic (in)justice. Adopting an interpretive stance, we focused on the participants’ actions from their own perspective; the practices of teachers Robi and Hille were of particular interest from the outset. We found that their positionality was deeply engaged with power dynamics surrounding the ID label. They actualized awareness of their privilege and actively refused both ableism and ‘compulsory abledness’ (Thorneycroft 2024, 95).

The second stage—selecting, sorting, and coding—involved an iterative engagement with fieldnotes, video clips, and transcribed interviews and group discussions. Maintaining an openness to emergent themes required multiple readings of the entire data set (Copland and Creese 2015). Guided by the research question, the analysis focused on the teachers’ relations, interactions, and actions within this particular institutional structure, examining how these practices were embedded in the broader social-educational context. Through an abductive process, we synthesized these empirical findings with the theoretical frameworks of cognitive ableism and structural epistemic injustice in education, highlighting educational rights as an ethical issue.

In the Findings section, we relate our data to Nikolaidis’ (2023) framework of institutional-structural processes and individual/collective agency. The first section, Structural Developments vis-à-vis Learners in Subject-Area Courses, examines the unfair distribution of epistemic goods at the institutional level. We present and discuss reports from the Swedish National Agency for Education, which document negative trends in access to adult education for this learner group. Importantly, these reports were cited by the teachers in our ethnographic data as concrete evidence of structural injustice and systemic ableism.

The succeeding two sections engage with Nikolaidis’ (2023) ‘remedy’ approaches as manifested through individual and collective agency, highlighting various forms of epistemic activism. The section Teacher Perspectives: Questioning Structure as Epistemic Injustice demonstrates how Robi and Hille discursively rejected ableism in group discussions and interviews. Subsequently, the section Teacher Actions: Expanding Time and Networks via Online Encounters focuses on Robi’s practical strategies for overcoming limited access to education by expanding communicative and social spaces through her teaching practice.

Hence, this paper centers on teachers’ epistemic activism in relation to structural-institutional processes. Acknowledging the complexities of structural injustice (e.g., Haslanger 2024; Nikolaidis 2023), we do not view the disruption or reproduction of structure as an immediate occurrence, but as part of dynamic social-structural processes. In the concluding discussion, the teachers’ actions are analyzed in relation to the identified structural epistemic injustices. In doing so, we engage with a critique of individual teacher ‘heroism’ as an inadequate, yet common, response to structural failure.

Structural Developments vis-à-vis Learners in Subject-Area Courses

According to reports from the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket 2021), demands for measurable progression have intensified for adult learners with the ID label since 2013. This reflects a systemic shift toward a narrow focus on disciplinary knowledge that can be measured and assessed. Consequently, educational rights have become so heavily conditioned that this target group is increasingly excluded. As municipalities align with these restrictive mandates, students have been increasingly discharged from studies, which relates to failing to exhibit conventional progress. Statistics show a substantial decrease in both student enrollment⁸ and the number of municipalities providing adapted adult education⁹ (Skolverket 2024). This creates a cruel paradox: students labeled with ID are increasingly deemed ineligible for the very programs designed to serve them.

In line with this shift, municipalities have increasingly denied adults labeled with ID access to adapted adult education if they are already enrolled in daily activity programs (Luthra, Tideman, and Staland-Nyman 2025). This tension is frequently justified by vague claims that an individual’s ‘needs’ have already been met elsewhere. The aim of daily activity is to develop practical abilities and afford individuals increased opportunities for participation in society (SFS 1993: 387). While both daily activity and adapted learning centers share this overarching goal of participation, they represent fundamentally distinct institutional practices. Daily activity is grounded in a framework of social support and habilitation, whereas learning centers are mandated to provide formal education, taught by qualified teachers, and foster intellectual growth. Confusing these two practices—or treating them as interchangeable—risks undermining the specific right of adult learners with ID to access relevant formal education. In addition, the exercise of this right is contingent upon institutional cooperation, which is fundamental to ensuring that potential students are made aware of their entitlement to formal education. In line with such an equity-focused perspective, it is important to recognize that this learner group has the democratic right to vote in general elections.

As a result of these developments, enrollment among students labeled with ID has declined, and the remaining courses offer significantly fewer lessons compared to other learner groups. This trend was observed at both Redwood and Beech Centers. At Beech Center, activities diminished over time, resulting in fewer learners and staff. In this environment, actual teaching time was further limited as teachers and assistants were required to manage medical conditions, transportation logistics, and personal care, effectively sidelining the primary pedagogical task.

As outlined above, we argue that such structural developments need to be understood through the teachers’ perspective (see also Haslanger 2024). Consequently, we focus on how Robi and Hille identified these institutional developments, which shaped their shared professional experience. In both group discussions and interviews, they foregrounded this developmental trend primarily as a fundamental ethical dilemma. We find that their response implies an urgent need for pedagogical ethics that actively resist epistemic transparency (Taylor 2023) in safeguarding the educational rights of learners labeled with ID.

Teacher Perspectives: Questioning Structure as Epistemic Injustice

The following dialogue (Example 1) is drawn from a group discussion involving teachers from all participating learning centers. Robi and Hille, alongside two colleagues who did not work with learners labeled with ID, participated. Prior to this exchange, the teachers had engaged in presentations and seminars led by the researchers. The sessions focused on ableism and crip theory, specifically addressing the resistance to ideologies that ascribe ‘normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies’ (Kafer 2013, 6). In this excerpt, Robi addresses Hille, highlighting the structural injustices uniquely faced by their students in subject-area courses.

Example 1: Excerpt from a teacher group discussion, 25 May 2023.

Robi expresses her discontent, stating that her students ‘have been given the least attention for their learning from the Swedish National Agency for Education and various schools’. By pointing to the Swedish National Agency for Education, she addresses educational structure and how their students become marginalized in the education system at large. Robi states that ‘you really feel when you work with the group that is, so to speak, the lowest ranked’. She illustrates this through the prevailing deficiency perspectives, noting how student information on websites defines her student group by what they cannot do—’for you who can’t speak, who can’t read, for you who can’t write’. Instead, Robi suggests describing the students as those ‘who use many languages multimodally’, thereby directly challenging the able-minded supremacy (Taylor and McDonough 2021) and flipping the ableist discourse toward a resource-oriented perspective. Robi also highlights how ‘the lowest ranking’ of her students results in a pervasive devaluation that ‘affects everybody’, including herself as a teacher. Her remark that one must ‘work like a dog to improve the quality in an organization’—followed by a weary grumble—serves as an illustration of the disproportionate labor required to uphold pedagogical standards within an ableist institutional-structural framework. These affective expressions align with Dunne and Kotsonis’ (2023) analysis of the emotional burden inherent in the repeated requirement to justify students’ epistemic worth.

Robi seeks support from Hille, who reinforces this advocacy by emphasizing that their students ‘should be allowed to contribute more to our society and be seen much more, and so on, because they have their perspective, which is valuable to us as well’. Hille’s statement underscores the principle of epistemic reciprocity (Fricker 2015), directly challenging the logics of cognitive ableism. Like Robi, Hille frames the invisibility and devaluation of their students as a systemic societal issue. She further notes that teaching this group requires engaging with time in non-normative ways, stating that ‘it’s a different pace and different considerations’. Ultimately, both teachers perform the explanatory labor identified by Dunne and Kotsonis (2023) as a form of epistemic activism (Medina and Whitt 2021; Nikolaidis, 2023), actively asserting their students’ epistemic worth against a devaluing institutional backdrop.

At the time of the fieldwork, the number of students was decreasing, and lesson time was shorter compared to other student groups (see Example 1). Example 2 comes from another teacher group discussion, where Robi responds to a question about current main challenges. As evident from the excerpt, she addresses how the ethical foundation of this educational institution does not quite hold for the subject-area courses.

Example 2: Excerpt of a statement by Teacher Robi during teacher group discussions, 30 May 2022.

Yes, then it is like, I think, to establish these ethical foundations, to uphold them, that we have equal value and that everyone can develop, different consequences that arise from that. Everyone has the right to education … And I think it is a big challenge from my vantage point as a teacher in subject areas. I believe that if the ethical part doesn’t hold, then it starts to give way. It begins to sway in the construction. So, I see this as a big challenge, not to have to fight for it to the extent that I think we need to. And then the question is, does it involve resources? We get appointments for job positions, how much we teach, whether we get to be involved in materials that are sent out, whether we get more marketing. Yes, a lot of things.

Robi emphasizes the necessity of an ethical foundation rooted in ‘equal value’, the belief that ‘everyone can develop’ and ‘has the right to education’. In doing so, she actively resists epistemic transparency (Taylor 2023). However, Robi notes that this ethical foundation ‘begins to sway in the construction’, highlighting the detrimental structural-material consequences for subject-area courses. She points to systemic failures—lack of resources, teacher availability, and limited teaching hours—as well as the exclusion of teachers from broader institutional decisions and marketing. For Robi, these issues constitute a ‘big challenge’ that forces teachers into a perpetual ‘fight’. This excerpt illustrates how moral resistance and critical questioning underpin the teachers’ epistemic activism.

In another group discussion, Hille highlights the consequences of ableist structures where ‘the ethical part doesn’t hold’. She points to insufficient marketing as a systemic failure that directly marginalizes people labelled with ID by denying them the information necessary to exercise their right to study. As Hille put it: ‘They do exist, our students, but we don’t get to know that they exist.’ This serves as a stark example of the repeated explanatory labor performed by Robi and Hille as they strive to make privileged institutional actors aware of these structural injustices.

In discussion, Robi frequently addressed how structural-material injustices interact with the epistemology of cognitive ableism. She critiqued the recklessness of deeming learners ‘uneducable’ or as making ‘no progress’ without accounting for the quality of the instruction provided (see also Hedman et al. 2025). Robi contested the portrayal of learners labeled with ID in the National Agency for Education’s report (Skolverket 2021) as idle and nearly unteachable. She highlighted passages where students were depicted as failing to distinguish between adapted adult education and daily activity centers, or as simply needing to ‘make a greater effort’. Robi found such sweeping ableist reviews profoundly harmful, demonstrating how her epistemic activism functioned as a direct counter-discourse to current structural-institutional developments.

In the final interview with Robi (Example 3), Robi underscores her vision for the future of adapted education, insisting that these centers must become ‘a school that everyone can attend’.

Example 3: Excerpt from an interview with Teacher Robi, 19 December 2024.

I think we need to be a school that everyone can attend, because otherwise they can’t go anywhere else. There should be a vanishingly small number who can’t go here, so then it could be about the safety of other students or something like that.

Then there is an inherent problem that is also difficult to tackle here, and that is that we offer very little teaching for people with slow learning and memory issues … Once it appeared in an annual report that we had ‘long-timers’, we should avoid long-timers. That provoked me too. And that is because they have the right to take the courses, as they are part of a certain quota in the programs. If you go for two and a half hours a week, the courses get really long, but that also kind of affects learning a bit, of course.

Robi asserts her students’ ‘right to take the courses’, arguing that only concerns regarding personal safety—rather than slow progression—should justify discharging a student. In doing so, she highlights an inherent systemic failure: the insufficient amount of teaching hours provided for individuals with a slower learning pace or memory challenges. Furthermore, Robi critiques the pejorative labeling of her students as ‘long-timers’, or långliggare, in official reports. Her visceral reaction to this term—stating that it ‘provoked’ her—illustrates the harmful impact of such symbolic oppression (Dotson 2018) and reinforces her activist role as an advocate against institutional ableism. Robi argues that when minimal lesson hours are provided, ‘the courses get really long’, highlighting how students’ needs are neglected by a scant offering of time. Paradoxically, the students are then blamed for a perceived lack of productivity. This dilemma reflects a broader shift in adult education where learning is viewed primarily as a means to produce employable subjects for the labor market. Robi’s critique exposes how the pressure for rapid progress clashes with her students’ right to take the courses, revealing that such pressure is rooted in the ideology of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer 2006). Ultimately, her critique serves to dismantle the harmful ideologies that underpin the systemic marginalization of her students.

These examples demonstrate that the teachers readily identified structural epistemic injustices within this educational context. Through dialogue and critical reflections, they actively questioned these inequities. Furthermore, Robi and Hille reframed these issues, offering alternative interpretations that challenge dominant perspectives. Our analysis also indicates that the emotional labor underpinning such epistemic activism exacts a significant toll on them.

Since this paper is based on longitudinal data, we were able to identify changes over time. Later in our fieldwork (Project 2), Robi expanded on existing lesson opportunities as a means of reorganizing the educational structure (see Nikolaidis 2023). Below, we foreground Robi’s decision to offer extra online lessons in one of her courses. She also connected her students with a group of students from another learning center to widen and enrich their limited learning space. In the following section, we demonstrate how these actions manifested online and in class as a response to harmful stereotypes and cognitive ableism regarding her students.

Teacher Actions: Expanding Time and Networks via Online Encounters

Robi shared that she had been considering offering extra online lessons for some time. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a broader understanding of the role of online teaching, specifically regarding who could benefit from it, and in what ways (see Wedin, Norlund Shaswar, and Ljung Egeland 2025). Nevertheless, students labeled with ID were generally excluded from compulsory online teaching in Sweden during the pandemic. This exclusion meant that harmful stereotypes about these learners continued to hinder teachers like Robi from implementing adapted online lessons (see also Adams Lyngbäck et al. 2021). Notwithstanding such ‘unwarranted inferences about global intellectual competence’ (Taylor and McDonough 2021, 29), Robi decided to offer extra online lessons, which became part of her formal working hours.

Example 4: Excerpt from an interview with Teacher Robi, 19 December 2024.

You can’t say that something is going well until you have explored it and tried it and made better decisions yourself, because it was a learning process for me too. But from that [the COVID-19 pandemic], I got to have, or no, I offered to have a group an extra day a week, just to be able to meta-reflect a little on what we have done, and sometimes we can also watch a video clip of the previous lessons an extra time, like, yeah, to fill up with new knowledge too, but mostly maybe reflection, and going through the lesson, and then you learn to interact in that kind of environment, and that is good too.

Robi’s initial statement—that one needs to test something in order to know if it works—indicates a desire to provide proof of concept and demonstrate what is possible. These online meetings served as a way to reflect on topics discussed during previous onsite lessons, affording students additional opportunities to engage with the material. Above all, Robi emphasized the potential for collective reflection and interaction within a new learning environment, stating: ‘you learn to interact in that kind of environment’.

During our fieldwork, Robi’s class engaged with various themes, such as the human body and a unit on love and friendship. These lessons utilized films, photos, and various artefacts. Within the theme of love and friendship, students worked on individual projects—including books, songs, and storytelling—culminating in a collective film production. We found that the online lessons facilitated qualitatively different learning encounters. The fact that both the learners and the teacher were located in their homes, with cameras enabled, fostered new themes, forms of relating, and demonstrated skills. Furthermore, this teacher-led initiative foregrounded the learners’ shared social networks. This arrangement also required Robi to engage family members and support staff at the students’ homes to facilitate the sessions. Example 5, taken from an online lesson, illustrates this as one student, Amy, shares photos from a recent social gathering where several students had met the previous Friday.

Example 5: Vignette from an online lesson, 26 November 2024.

Robi asks the group what happened last Friday. Both Ina and Amy had attended an event at a venue where they usually meet during weekends. Last Friday, there was a music band playing, and they had been dancing. During this online lesson, Robi receives photos from Amy, showing the band and some of the students dancing. We admire the photos, and Robi asks about the band. Robi also connects the photos to the theme of love and friendship. Here, Jem, who did not attend this event, enters the dialogue by directing attention to her dear cat Simba that is visible on the screen.

The dialogue around this shared social experience is supported by Amy’s photos, which captured a band playing and several students dancing. By engaging in this digital space, the students also developed their proficiency with online technology and challenged ableist notions of which groups are capable of navigating such environments. Furthermore, because all students had their cameras enabled, they gained immediate insight into one another’s social worlds. As evidenced in Example 5, these interactions frequently included Jem’s cat Simba—a recurring presence in all online lessons. Consequently, the interaction in these extra lessons connected the learners not only as peers within a course but as members of a social and epistemic community with equal opportunity to express themselves and bring up subjects based on their interests.

At the conclusion of the fieldwork, Robi arranged an inter-center online meeting. The group gathered in class to connect with a similar group of learners from another city, referred to here as South Port, who were also enrolled in the Life Skills and Health course online. Since both groups had explored the same thematic unit on love and friendship, the meeting allowed their community—already consolidated through both onsite and online interactions—to expand and include additional students.

Example 6: Vignette from an online lesson, 12 December 2024.

The class is sitting in a row in front of the screen where Robi is about to connect the other group and their teacher from South Port. On the table in front of them, the students have question cards with pictures and text. It is Christmas time, and there is a string of lights on the table. The atmosphere is cozy and inviting.

When the other group starts to connect, Robi excitedly shouts, ‘Now South Port is here, let South Port in!’ When all of their participants appear on the screen, Jem puts on her Santa hat, waves, and says loudly, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Everyone waves, and Robi says ‘Hello, hello!’ after which Petra shouts, ‘Hi South Port.’ Later on, both groups show their own films from the Love and Friendship project. Jem’s cat Simba comes up, and Robi says that Simba usually joins their online lessons every week. This piques the interest of the other group, who ask if it isn’t difficult to have lessons on the computer. To that question, Ina answers ‘no’, and Amy says ‘yes’; Jem says it is ‘easy’, René says it is ‘good’, and Ruth ‘don’t know’. Robi concludes that they have slightly different opinions.

The other group shows books that they recommend. Regarding the first book about love, Jem says, ‘we have that one, I’m working on it’, and another book piques Jem’s interest. She tells Robi that ‘we haven’t read that one’, to which Robi agrees and states that she hasn’t read it either. They look on with interest as the book is displayed. Jem tells Robi, ‘we need to order that one’, and Jem receives an affirmative response from Robi—’yes, we need to order it, great!’—who also clearly says to everyone: ‘We are ordering them, you hear me?’ Towards the end of the meeting, Jem suggests that they should meet in person. Robi says that it might be something they could do a bit later when spring comes, and the group is told that they are welcome to visit them at South Port.

It is evident that the previous online lessons had accustomed the students to the digital format. They readily shared their work—such as films and books—alongside their experiences from prior sessions. Jem’s suggestion to order a recommended book and arrange an in-person meeting with the South Port group further demonstrates the exercise of student agency. Consequently, these interactions served as a means of both sharing and expanding their epistemic and social worlds; the students were positioned as epistemic subjects capable of contributing meaningfully to shared educational themes and discussions (Fricker 2007).

Robi’s engagement with professional and social networks (see Medina and Whitt 2021) was evident in both this collaboration between the learning centers and the online lessons. We find that this pedagogical approach enriched possibilities for relation-building and learning; however, we do not consider such a response to be necessarily ideal or sufficient for the education system at large. While incorporating online teaching formed a feasible response to structural constraints from the teacher’s perspective, online teaching per se is not a panacea. Indeed, systemic introductions of online teaching in adult education have often been driven by cost-reduction motives (Åkerfeldt, Paul, and Hrastinski 2025). Furthermore, this approach necessitated a significant, unpaid workload for the teacher. We argue, however, that these acts signify a direct reaction to identified structural injustices (Nikolaidis 2023). Importantly, this reorganization of lesson structure resulted in a widened space for epistemic and social exchange.

Concluding Discussion

Injustices in educational systems are persistently ongoing, as they fail to ‘distribute epistemic goods fairly’ (Nikolaidis 2023, 853). In this context, adapted adult education formed the only municipal option for the students to pursue further studies. Moreover, we noted that these opportunities were gradually diminishing, particularly through limited lesson time. The teachers, Robi and Hille, identified these structural realities as injustices underpinned by cognitive ableism, which negatively impacted their students. Both teachers drew attention to how their students were presented in ableist ways—thereby highlighting ethical concerns and demonstrating how harmful epistemological orientations regarding learners with the ID label continue to permeate educational structures (Verbeek, Koning, and Schippers 2024). Grounded in an ethics of viewing their students as epistemic agents, these teachers also enacted alternative ways of knowing and doing (Medina and Whitt 2021); for instance, by expanding lesson opportunities to reorganize the educational structure (Nikolaidis 2023). The shaping of such intercontextual relations was found to be conducive to expanding epistemic and social worlds through epistemic reciprocity (Fricker 2015). The teachers’ epistemic activism thus created interactional spaces for questioning and resisting as moral actions. We interpret these actions as potentially disruptive of circumstances that reproduce and fortify structural epistemic injustices.

In line with Nikolaidis’ (2023) theorizing, we find that changing harmful epistemological orientations will not occur without epistemic activism. At the same time, epistemic activism—as both individual and collective actions—does not easily transform structure in an all-or-nothing manner. While Robi’s actions did not halt the uneven distribution of lesson hours and course admittance on a broader structural level, they qualitatively shaped different and widened learning experiences locally. However, such activism does not come without a cost, considering the additional workload, advocacy for and implementation of extra lesson time, and the emotional labor associated with repeatedly giving voice to students’ epistemic rights. In fact, it is important that teachers are not exploited for such emotional labor (Dunne and Kotsonis 2023). This is particularly relevant in relation to Robi’s experiences, and we do not advocate for individual teacher heroism as a solution to address ableism.

The strength of Nikolaidis’ (2023) theorizing lies in its recognition of the persistent structural hindrances to epistemic justice, paired with the role of individual and collective action within institutional processes. In this case, these actions manifested as critical and collective ‘talking back’ to identified injustices (see Freire 1973), alongside the incorporation of expanded pedagogical approaches. The interconnectedness of such multifaceted actions is most effectively captured through longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork.

Importantly, longitudinal ethnographic approaches are essential for making epistemic activism visible over time, demonstrating how such resistance manifests in various forms and at a significant cost. Such an approach also contributes empirically to current theorizing on structural epistemic injustice as an ethical concern within education.

On a final note, we emphasize the need for longitudinal research situated in diverse contexts to further our understanding of how to combat the pervasive epistemic marginalization of learners labeled as intellectually disabled. This issue must step out of the shadows, especially given the dark history of the treatment of people with ID—a legacy that continues to permeate not only adult education but the entire education system, including academia and our own research fields. Consequently, an actionable recommendation is to cease limiting access to, and the right to participate in, educational programs designed specifically for this group who has the democratic right to vote in general elections.

Additional File

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: