Who Owns Perception?

In August 2024, Cambridge University initiated an investigation into plagiarism allegations against Jason Arday. He was the youngest Black professor ever appointed to a chair at the university. By August 2026, he was cleared.

Something happened in that interval. Something about who gets to decide what counts as original thought. Who owns the right to define perception.

This is not a new question. It is the oldest question in epistemology. It has always been a question about power.

The Archive and Its Gatekeepers

Descartes and the Isolated Mind (1641)

René Descartes positioned the thinking subject as isolated. Cogito ergo sum. A solitary mind that must doubt everything until arriving at certainty through individual reason. This framework had specific consequences. It made perception and thought into individual property. My thoughts are mine. Your thoughts are yours. The institution that authenticates which thoughts are original, which belong to whom, becomes the arbiter of intellectual property.

Descartes was not trying to be cruel. He was looking for ground in a world of religious and political upheaval. But the framework he created made it possible for institutions to police the boundary between original and derivative thought. Between perception that counts and perception that merely echoes.

Kant and the Universal Subject (1781)

Immanuel Kant went further. All perception is structured by categories of the mind. Space, time, causality. We do not perceive the world as it is. We perceive it through forms that are universal to all rational beings. This sounds democratic. Everyone has a rational mind. Everyone perceives through the same categories.

But Kant's universalism contained a particular. It was the mind of the European male subject that Kant took as universal. Everyone else's perception was measured against this standard. Those whose categories differed, Indigenous peoples, women, colonized peoples, were not seen as having different perception. They were seen as lacking rationality.

Institutions could now claim that their way of perceiving was not particular. It was universal. Those who perceived differently were not offering alternatives. They were failing to perceive.

Foucault and the Archive (1969)

Michel Foucault named something specific. Perception is not free. It is structured by what he called the archive, the accumulated set of statements, frameworks, and categories that determine what can be said and thought in a given historical moment. You cannot perceive outside the archive. You can only perceive within it. The archive is not neutral. It is constructed through power.

What we call knowledge is the sediment of particular power relationships. The knowledge that becomes legitimate, that gets recorded, that becomes institutional truth, serves the institutions that control the archive.

To change what can be perceived, you must change the archive. You must make new statements possible. You must make new categories legible. Institutions invested in the stability of the existing archive will resist this.

Said and the Orientalist Frame (1978)

Edward Said showed how entire continents and peoples were perceived through a frame, Orientalism, that had nothing to do with how those places and peoples actually were. The frame was created by European colonial power to make colonization seem rational, even benevolent. It taught people to see the colonized world through categories that justified colonization.

Said's observation was specific. The colonizer owns the right to perceive. The colonized person is perceived. They are not the perceiver.

This is not about accuracy. An Orientalist can be accurate about surface facts while being entirely wrong about meaning, value, and possibility. The problem is not accuracy. The problem is who is the subject of perception and who is its object.

Indigenous Epistemology (Ongoing)

Indigenous knowledge systems offer a different answer to the question of who owns perception. No one owns it alone. Perception is relational. It is shared. It is held in relationship with land, with community, with non-human relatives. Knowledge is not property. It is a relationship.

This framework was suppressed for centuries under colonialism, which required making perception into property, into intellectual property, into land property, into bodies as property. Indigenous peoples have never stopped practicing relational knowing. They have never stopped perceiving in ways that cannot be owned by a single institution.

The Case of Jason Arday

Jason Arday is a sociologist at Cambridge. He studies how race, neurodiversity, and institutional systems shape perception. His book We See Things They'll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity argues that marginalized people, people forced to navigate systems not built for them, develop forms of perception that dominant systems cannot access.

In 2024, Cambridge initiated an investigation into plagiarism allegations against his work. Questions were raised about whether his published work contained unattributed material. The investigation was formal. His reputation was suspended. The question was clear: did this work belong to him?

By August 2026, Cambridge concluded that Arday had not committed plagiarism. His work stood as his own.

What the Investigation Demonstrates

During the investigation, Arday could not defend himself without risking the appearance of defending himself. The institution owned the right to judge. The archive, the accumulated standards of what counts as original, derivative, permissible citation, was theirs to interpret.

Arday's entire project is about how institutions render certain forms of knowing invisible. How they fail to see what marginalized scholars see. How they reproduce their own blindness by insisting on their own standards of vision. An institution was investigating whether he could be trusted to have generated original thought according to institutional standards of originality.

This is not incidental. This is how institutions protect themselves.

Who Owns the Archive

The investigation raises Foucault's question directly. Who owns the archive? Who decides what counts as original? Who decides which thoughts belong to whom?

In principle, scholarship is collaborative. Thought builds on thought. No one invents alone. We all draw from the commons of human knowledge. But institutions do not function on principle. They require clear ownership. They require attribution. They require the appearance of individual genius. Individual genius can be managed, evaluated, ranked, promoted, expelled. Collaborative knowledge cannot.

Arday is a Black man at an elite institution. He is younger than most people holding his position. His work challenges the institution's way of seeing. When institutions investigate scholars in this position, they are performing something specific. They are saying, we are uncertain whether you are a thinking subject. We are uncertain whether your perception counts as perception. We must investigate whether you have generated original thought or merely echoed others.

This is Kant's standard operating. The standard of originality, of authentic thinking, is the standard of the institution. Those who perceive differently, who cite differently, who build knowledge in different ways, risk being seen as derivative. As not-quite-thinking.

The Pedigree of the Problem

When European epistemology became global epistemology, through colonialism and professionalization and institutional standardization, it took the standards of European thought as universal. The archive became Eurocentric. Originality became defined as European originality. Citation became defined as European citation practice.

Indigenous knowledge systems working through oral tradition, through collective knowing, through relationship rather than individual authorship, could not be recognized as original. They were surviving remnants of pre-rational thinking.

Black intellectual traditions developed outside institutional recognition, through churches, mutual aid networks, underground publishing, were not in the archive. They could not be acknowledged as sources. When contemporary Black scholars drew from this tradition, they risked being seen as not citing their sources. As derivative.

What Wells-Barnett Did

Ida B. Wells-Barnett did rigorous empirical research on lynching. She documented patterns. She published. She could not publish in journals that owned the archive. She could not be recognized as an originary sociologist because she was a Black woman doing research outside institutional channels.

When Du Bois did similar work years later, from within the university, he was recognized as a founder of American sociology. The work was similar. The difference was institutional permission.

What Arday Inherits

When Jason Arday publishes work about how institutions fail to recognize certain forms of knowing, he draws from the Wells-Barnett tradition. He draws from neurodiversity scholarship developed outside academia. He draws from Black radical traditions that never required institutional validation.

When he cites these sources, he is doing something the archive resists. He is saying the archive should expand. That these traditions count. That they should be recognizable as sources of original thought.

Institutions do not welcome this expansion easily. Not from cruelty. But because expanding the archive means admitting that their previous way of defining originality was particular, not universal. That they have been excluding entire ways of knowing.

The Structure of the Problem

According to Descartes, I own my own thoughts. But institutions mediate that ownership. They decide which thoughts are mine, which are derivative, which are original enough to count.

According to Kant, everyone owns perception through rational universality. But the universal is particular. The rational subject is the European male subject. Everyone else's perception is measured against this standard.

According to Foucault, no one owns perception. We all work within the archive. The archive owns us. Institutions control the archive. So institutions own the right to define what counts as thought.

According to Said, the colonizer owns the right to perceive. The colonized person is perceived, not perceiving.

According to Indigenous epistemology, perception cannot be owned. It is relational. It belongs to the relationship.

When an institution investigates whether Arday's work is really his work, it is asserting its right to own the archive, and therefore to own the distinction between original and derivative. We decide what counts as thought. We decide who is a thinker. We decide which traditions are sources. We decide whether you belong to the category of thinking subject or the category of echo.

Arday was cleared. But the investigation happened. This matters. It demonstrates how much power institutions hold over perception itself. Over who gets to think. Over which thoughts count.

The Mechanism

If perception is shaped by institutions, and institutions own the archive that determines what counts as legitimate perception, then institutions own the right to define reality itself.

This is not metaphorical. When an institution controls the archive, when it determines which sources are legitimate, which methods are valid, which findings are real, it controls what people can perceive as possible.

A school system controls the archive of what counts as education. It controls what students perceive about learning. A medical system controls the archive of what counts as health. It controls what patients perceive about healing. A financial system controls the archive of what counts as productivity. It controls what people perceive about value.

If institutions own the right to define legitimate perception, then those excluded from institutional recognition are excluded from the category of knowers. They are perceived, but not perceiving. Observed, but not observing. Studied, but not studying.

Recovery requires changing the archive itself. Making new kinds of knowing legible. Expanding what counts as original thought, original source, original thinker. It requires institutions admitting they do not own perception. That perception is larger than their archive. That people marginalized by institutional standards see things institutional standards cannot access.

What Follows

Jason Arday was cleared. Thousands of scholars working outside institutional recognition remain under suspicion. Not because their work is insufficient. Because it does not fit institutional categories.

Changing what institutions can perceive begins with admission. That they have been perceiving narrowly. That the archive is incomplete. That original thought is happening in places the archive does not recognize.

Then: expanding the archive. Making room for new sources. Recognizing new thinkers. Allowing the category of legitimate knowledge to grow.

This is not political correctness. Institutions claiming to seek truth while refusing to recognize entire ways of knowing are not seeking truth. They are defending territory.

The question remains: who owns perception?

The answer should be: no one. Perception is too large to be owned. Too complex to be standardized. Too alive to be archived completely.

Until institutions admit this, we will continue to see investigations into whether marginal thinkers have really thought. Tests of whether their perception really belongs to them.

The work ahead is clear. Admitting the archive was never universal. Building a new one together. Letting go of the need to own perception. Learning to share it.