Across European education systems, inclusion is increasingly framed in terms of access, participation, and recognition of diversity. Policy frameworks and institutional practices emphasise widening access and supporting engagement, particularly in higher education and professional pathways. Yet many autistic adults—especially those who have formally entered and remained within these systems—describe persistent exhaustion, withdrawal, and burnout that arise not from exclusion, but from the sustained effort of remaining included. This recurring pattern raises a central question: under what conditions does participation become sustainable, and what does it require to remain recognisable as such within contemporary inclusion regimes?

This paper develops the concept of inclusive exhaustion to analyse exhaustion as a relational and institutional phenomenon rather than an individual coping failure. It builds on qualitative research on autistic burnout, masking, and participation (Raymaker et al., 2020; Botha & Frost, 2020; Hull et al., 2017), which consistently describes cycles of high effort, delayed collapse, and withdrawal. While this research is often interpreted in terms of stress or vulnerability, the present analysis instead examines the conditions under which participation becomes possible, and how these conditions are distributed.

The argument proceeds through a distinction between epistemic and performative dimensions of participation. Epistemic difficulty concerns the work of understanding and learning. Performative difficulty concerns the conditions under which this understanding must become visible as competence—through timing, responsiveness, and adherence to implicit norms. This distinction helps explain why exhaustion persists even where epistemic access is supported: while learning may be accessible, the conditions under which learning must be displayed remain continuous and evaluatively charged.

Within this framework, participation depends not only on knowledge or competence, but on the capacity to render that competence intelligible under prevailing expectations. This often involves what can be described as translation labour: the ongoing work of interpreting expectations, calibrating responses, and aligning expression with dominant norms of communication. Participants describe not only having to understand tasks, but having to determine how much to say, how quickly to respond, and how to appear appropriately engaged.

These dynamics are situated within a critical–phenomenological account of institutional time and organisation. Drawing on work on rhythm and resonance (Fuchs, 2018; Rosa, 2019) and on audit and performativity in education (Ball, 2003; Power, 1997), the paper argues that educational environments are organised around expectations of continuous performance, visibility, and responsiveness. Where institutional systems lack slack or flexibility, the burden of adjustment shifts onto individuals, who must sustain alignment across contexts in order to remain recognisable as competent.

From this perspective, inclusive exhaustion can be understood as the cumulative cost of sustaining participation under conditions of misalignment between uneven cognitive rhythms and environments calibrated for continuous performance. Exhaustion emerges not simply from high demand, but from the requirement to remain intelligible within systems that do not make their expectations explicit. What appears as individual fatigue can thus be reinterpreted as an index of institutional miscalibration.

The paper contributes to inclusive education research by shifting the focus from access to the sustainability of participation over time. In relation to the conference theme Knowing and Acting, it highlights how inclusion regimes privilege particular forms of acting—being visibly engaged and responsive—while marginalising forms of knowing that unfold unevenly or require temporal margin. While developed through autistic experience, inclusive exhaustion is proposed as a travelling concept for understanding participation under audit-driven inclusion regimes more broadly.

This paper is conceptual and synthetic rather than empirical. It does not generate new primary data, but develops a conceptual argument through a re-reading of existing qualitative research on autistic participation, masking, and burnout, alongside relevant theoretical work in phenomenology, disability studies, and critical analyses of educational institutions. The aim is not to re-code empirical material, but to clarify the conditions under which participation becomes possible and sustainable within contemporary inclusion regimes. The analysis is guided by the following research question: under what conditions does participation become recognisable as competent and appropriate within educational environments, and how are these conditions distributed? This question shifts the focus from individual capacity or access to the relational and institutional organisation of participation. Methodologically, the paper proceeds through three interrelated analytical moves. First, it adopts a critical–phenomenological orientation to participation, drawing on accounts of embodied temporality, rhythm, and resonance (Fuchs, 2018; Rosa, 2019). Exhaustion is approached not simply as fatigue, but as a disturbance of participation over time: a point at which alignment between individual pacing and institutional expectations can no longer be sustained. This allows attention to how participation is lived, rather than only how it is formally structured. Second, it engages in a synthetic reading of qualitative research as experiential evidence. Studies of autistic burnout, masking, and participation (Raymaker et al., 2020; Botha & Frost, 2020; Hull et al., 2017) are treated as accounts of recurring patterns, including sustained effort, delayed collapse, and cycles of adaptation and withdrawal. Rather than extracting themes, the analysis attends to how participants describe the conditions under which their actions are recognised as competent, appropriate, or intelligible. Third, these experiential patterns are situated within a critical analysis of institutional organisation, particularly in relation to audit culture, performativity, and responsibilised self-management (Ball, 2003; Power, 1997). This step makes visible how expectations of continuous performance, visibility, and responsiveness are embedded in educational systems, and how variability is displaced onto individuals when institutional flexibility is limited. Across these analytical moves, the distinction between epistemic and performative difficulty functions as a conceptual tool for tracing how participation may be supported at the level of learning while remaining unsustainable at the level of recognition and display. The concept of inclusive exhaustion is developed through this synthesis as a way of naming the cumulative effects of these conditions.

This paper argues that exhaustion among autistic adults should be understood not primarily as individual vulnerability, but as a relational and institutional phenomenon arising from persistent misalignment between uneven cognitive rhythms and environments calibrated for continuous performance, responsiveness, and auditability. By conceptualising this dynamic as inclusive exhaustion, the analysis shifts attention from coping and resilience toward the organisation of participation itself. The central outcome is a reframing of exhaustion as an index of institutional miscalibration. Where educational systems prioritise continuity, visibility, and standardised pacing, variability must be absorbed somewhere. Under current conditions, this variability is disproportionately absorbed by individuals, through sustained efforts to interpret expectations and render their responses intelligible. Participation thus becomes conditional not only on access, but on the capacity to maintain recognisability over time. This reframing contributes to ongoing discussions in inclusive education research (e.g. Slee, 2018; Nilholm, 2020) by extending the focus from access and presence to the sustainability of participation. It suggests that inclusion cannot be evaluated solely in terms of entry or engagement, but must also consider whether participation can be maintained without disproportionate cost, and how responsibility for adjustment is distributed across individuals and institutions. For educational practice, the analysis points toward the importance of attending to institutional tempo, expectations of visibility, and the availability of temporal margin. This includes recognising forms of participation that do not align with continuous responsiveness, and creating conditions that allow for variation in pacing, recovery, and modes of engagement. Finally, while developed through autistic experience, inclusive exhaustion is proposed as a travelling concept for analysing participation under audit-driven inclusion regimes more broadly. Future research could examine how temporal demands are negotiated across educational contexts, and how institutional rhythms might be recalibrated to support more sustainable and equitable forms of participation.

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