Justice as Access to Intellectual Citizenship

Sor Juana fought for her right to study, think, and contribute intellectually despite institutional barriers rooted in her gender and her status. For disabled people, intellectual citizenship means justice demands more than survival or charity—it requires genuine access to education, intellectual community, platforms for knowledge-sharing, and recognition of disabled people's intellectual contributions. This is not accommodations as afterthought but structural redesign of knowledge institutions to include disabled minds. Justice as intellectual citizenship means disabled scholars are not exotic additions but central participants; disabled voices shape what counts as knowledge; disabled experiences inform epistemology itself. It means removing barriers to publishing, speaking, teaching, and leading in intellectual spaces. Sor Juana's insistence on her right to know becomes a demand for systemic change: that disabled people's intellectual lives matter equally, that access to knowledge-making is a right not a privilege, that disability identity enriches rather than diminishes intellectual communities.