This glossary maps how systems design around lived experience rather than with it. These patterns show up when authorities pretend to include—but redirect, obscure, or neutralise your voice at every step.
Refusing Direct Engagement While Appearing Open
When systems claim to be receptive to feedback but repeatedly route it to dead ends, irrelevant staff, or delayed “future planning cycles.”
This tactic creates the illusion of inclusion while exhausting participants into silence.
Barriers Built from Bureaucratic Niceties
When the system avoids saying “no” but designs impossible pathways that function as a no.
This includes excessive forms, vague eligibility criteria, or open-ended application processes that technically exist—but aren’t meant to succeed.
Symbolic Participation Without Influence
Inviting lived-experience contributors to consultations or panels without any intention to incorporate their recommendations.
This uses presence as permission—conflating being seen with being heard or empowered.
Weaponising Red Tape
When the complaints or reform process is made deliberately confusing, untraceable, or repetitive.
Designed to overwhelm or discredit the complainant through technicalities, not truth.
“We Don’t Handle That Here”
Passing concerns from agency to agency until the original issue is diluted or abandoned.
This form of bureaucratic ping-pong deflects responsibility under the guise of referral.
A collection of protected semantic frameworks written by lived-experience authors. Each glossary holds the line against pattern theft, narrative laundering, and coercive rewording.
These terms defend the metadata of lived experience in digital systems.
View Entries →The core terms that scaffold SSA™ and uphold protocol-layer authorship.
View Entries →These terms unpack how institutions weaponise the language of inclusion while reinforcing control.
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