This isn’t a list of definitions. Glossary : Words in Context is a research artefact — part of my design process, part of my politics. I’ve used languaging as a metadesign tool: shaping meaning, situating terms, and offering clarity.
In research (especially around infant feeding, bodies, and care), words carry weight. They can include or exclude. Confuse or clarify. This glossary doesn’t aim to fix meaning, but to offer it — in context, from my voice, shaped through conversations with key informants and the messy richness of lived experience.
It’s a tool for understanding, but also for questioning. Read it as an invitation to think carefully about the words we use, and why they matter.
Listen up.
Here’s an audio version of Glossary: Words in Context, because words don’t just sit on pages — they live in mouths, in conversations, in everyday exchanges. Hearing them spoken helps surface their rhythm, their weight, their nuance.
This isn’t just for ease of access (though that matters deeply). It’s because language is alive. And when I say these words out loud, they feel different. They mean differently.
So listen in. Let the definitions move, shift, provoke. Let them be openings, not endings.
“...the terms, models, and metaphors that we use to speak and write allow some things to be remarked on, some questions to be asked, some suggestions to be formulated, while hiding or foreclosing others. They play a part in ordering reality.”
— Anne Marie Mol