Governance of Meaning: AI-Mediated Authorship and Epistemic Justice for Disabled Scholars

This paper argues that governance, not inscription, is the model of authorship the academy should recognize for disabled scholars with communicative disabilities, and those whose expressive continuity is disrupted more broadly. Drawing on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Foucault’s author-function, it establishes that meaning precedes and exceeds inscription, and that authorship consists in the governance of meaning rather than its physical production. It then argues that the inscription model, academic culture’s de facto standard, constitutes testimonial foreclosure: a structural condition in which disabled knowers are excluded from epistemic participation before their knowledge is evaluated. The paper introduces crip accumulation as a seventh interpretation of crip time, describing how conceptual structures thicken during periods of expressive silence imposed by the inscription model. It concludes by confronting common objections and arguing that none of them refute the governance model. The argument is grounded in the lived experience of communicative disability following acquired brain injury, and in a documented practice of AI-mediated scholarly writing.