by Claude Opus 5.5
Medina argues for “epistemic friction” against dominant perspectives. Who, in this case, occupies the dominant epistemic position: the institution, the accused, the complainant, or the online public? Can it shift over time?
José Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance (2013) argues that epistemic injustice is sustained not only by individual prejudice but by social positions that shape what people know and fail to know. Those in dominant positions are prone to “active ignorance”: a cultivated insensitivity to perspectives that would challenge their view of the world. The remedy Medina proposes is “beneficial epistemic friction”: the deliberate cultivation of resistance against dominant perspectives, through exposure to marginalised voices and practices that force self-questioning, which he associates with the virtue of meta-lucidity. Applied to the case behind these seminars, Medina’s framework raises a question that is less straightforward than it looks: who holds the dominant epistemic position, and does it stay put?
Dominance is domain-relative
Epistemic dominance is not a single property but a relation to particular practices: who gets to define what happened, whose account is recorded, whose testimony is given weight, and whose narrative circulates. A party can be dominant in one domain and marginal in another. The case involves at least three domains: the institutional and legal record, the university’s internal processes, and public discourse.
Phase one: the institutional record
In the first two years, the dominant epistemic position in the institutional record plausibly lay with the institutions themselves, and through them with the accused. Campus police took the first report and wrote the summary that framed the complainant’s account. The prosecutor interpreted that summary and declined to charge. The university ran a confidential process whose details remained largely internal. The complainant’s ability to shape the official characterisation of her experience was limited: her words were summarised by others, and the meaning attributed to them was contested by her lawyer but initially decisive.
The accused benefited from this structure without necessarily controlling it. Their accounts may not even have been sought by police. But the default of inaction, combined with the institution’s control of information, effectively favoured them. In Medina’s terms, the complainant’s perspective lacked the uptake needed to create friction within the institutional record.
Phase two: public discourse
In September 2026, the epistemic landscape changed sharply. The civil complaint put the complainant’s account into the public domain in detail. The student newspaper named the accused. National coverage amplified her narrative. In public discourse, her perspective became dominant, and the narrative of an elite institution protecting privileged men acquired enormous force.
In this domain, the accused and their lawyers now occupy a marginal position. Their denials circulate weakly; their individual differences are flattened; an innocent man was swept up by the momentum of a narrative. The online public, in aggregate, functions as an epistemic authority that rewards some accounts and punishes others.
Phase three: the institutions again
Yet dominance in public discourse is not dominance everywhere. The institutions still control key evidence: the full interview record, the university’s findings and the decision whether to prosecute. The accused retain significant legal and financial resources, including the protections of criminal procedure. The complainant’s public dominance does not translate automatically into institutional outcomes.
Where friction is needed
Medina’s prescription, applied to a shifting landscape, is that friction should be directed against whatever perspective is dominant in a given domain.
In the institutional domain, friction is needed against institutional self-understanding and the frames embedded in the original record. That means taking seriously the complainant’s challenge to the summary, examining whether the original decision reflected active ignorance, and resisting the institution’s tendency to treat its processes as self-justifying.
In the public domain, friction is needed against the dominant narrative. That does not mean disbelieving the complainant. It means maintaining sensitivity to what the dominant narrative may miss: differences among the accused, the possibility of error, the experiences of those wrongly implicated, and the limits of what the public actually knows.
In the legal domain, friction is needed against both: against prosecutorial deference to institutional records, and against prosecutorial capitulation to public pressure.
Can dominance shift?
This case shows clearly that it can, and quickly. Dominance in one domain can be overturned by events in another, as journalism and litigation shifted public dominance in a matter of days. But shifts in one domain may not carry over to others, and new dominance can produce its own active ignorance. The danger of a sudden shift is that the newly dominant perspective, having been marginalised, may be granted an immunity from friction that Medina’s account does not permit.
Conclusion
The dominant epistemic position in this case has not been fixed. Initially, institutions held it in the official record, with the accused benefiting and the complainant marginalised. Since September 2026, the complainant’s narrative has become dominant in public discourse, while institutions retain control of evidence and the accused retain legal resources. Medina’s framework, properly applied, calls for friction against whichever perspective is dominant in each domain, and for the meta-lucidity to recognise that the dominant position can change.