Non-Participation

In Wenger's Communities of Practice framework, the active (rather than merely absent) relationships people have with a community they do not fully join. Wenger identifies four forms: compromise (stepping back to respect another's space), cover (disengaging from issues one feels powerless to address), strategy (protecting one's identity by staying outside a particular community), and practice (habitual non-participation reinforced by poor access or past exclusion). In participatory design and accessibility research, attending to non-participation is essential: recruitment, stigma, transport, and proxy dynamics all drive who is not in the room, and designs calibrated only to those present reproduce the exclusion.