Inclusion Was Never Optional, You Just Treated It Like Formatting

Inclusion has long been positioned as an adjunct to scholarship: a post-hoc consideration applied after intellectual work is complete. This framing is untenable. Recent scholarship on Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination (PIRD) makes explicit what disabled scholars have experienced for decades: the inclusive artefact is not a translation of scholarship—it IS scholarship. This editorial argues that disability research has historically mined disabled people for data while stripping their contributions of authorship and attribution.