Scent Distress as an Unseen Barrier: Olfactory Exclusion within the Third Wave of Disability Theory

This working paper introduces Scent Distress as a previously unnamed barrier within disability theory, grounded in the emerging Distress Model. Drawing from lived experience, policy analysis, and critical scholarship, it examines how scent-based exclusion contributes to trauma, service disengagement, and unmet need among disabled people. The paper theorises Scent Distress not as a medical sensitivity, but as a structural barrier shaped by poverty, food insecurity, environmental precarity, public sanitation failures, and institutional neglect. It critiques the limitations of current sensory frameworks and calls for a trauma-informed, politically grounded reconceptualisation of access. By naming Scent Distress as a form of olfactory injustice, the paper contributes to the development of the Distress Model and positions it as a necessary reorientation from the Social Model. It advances a Third Wave of Disability Theory, accounting for lived distress and invisible exclusion. This version is released as a pre-print working paper and feedback is welcome at [email protected].