work the hyphens

Meaning

Verb

• To facilitate the integration of people who belong to marginalized subgroups.

Origin

• in her 1994 paper Working the hyphens: Reinventing the self and other in qualitative research, which was published in N. K. Denzin & Y.S.Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research; in reference to the hyphenated designations of many minority communities (e.g. Asian-American, African-American).