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Foreseeable harm, failed recognition: Tourette’s syndrome and epistemic injustice in broadcast institutions

Category: Journal Articles

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Melina Aikaterini Malli (28 May 2026): Foreseeable harm, failed recognition: Tourette’s syndrome and epistemic injustice in broadcast institutions, Disability & Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2026.2677510

 

At the 2026 BAFTAs, John Davidson, an activist with Tourette’s syndrome (TS) and subject of the film I Swear, experienced involuntary tics involving offensive words that were captured in the BBC broadcast and prompted backlash. Rather than treating the episode as a matter of individual intent, this essay examines it as a failure of institutional preparedness. It argues that epistemic injustice was at work in two forms. First, hermeneutical injustice lay in narrow institutional understandings of TS, which limited the interpretive resources through which broadcast risks could be recognised. This points to a hierarchy of institutional recognition in which some disabilities are anticipated and accommodated while others become legible only in crisis. Second, testimonial injustice was evident in scepticism directed towards Davidson and the TS community, whose accounts were filtered through assumptions about intention and moral character. The essay concludes that inclusion requires anticipatory infrastructures, including TS expertise during planning.

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