work the hyphens

Etymology
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 grammatical use of hyphens to represent a unified form of two discrete concepts, such as in or.

Verb

 * 1) To facilitate an improvement in communication and understanding between oneself and a person or group with a differing perspective, by comparing and contrasting the differences and fostering mutual adaptation around them.