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Contested Terms Concordance: A Living Cross-Disciplinary Glossary

A glossary that tracks how key terms in queer theory are defined across different academic fields.

A subscription glossary service that tracks how contested terms in queer theory are defined in the field's foundations versus how neighboring disciplines currently use them, with quarterly reports on what shifted — sold to style-guide bodies, publishers, and advocacy organizations.

Social SciencesGender and Feminist Studies
Career Development and DiversityPublishing and professional communications — style guides, dictionaries, and advocacy-organization glossaries.

Concept

A living terminology concordance delivered as a searchable database plus quarterly "what changed" diff reports, licensed to publishers, style-guide bodies, and advocacy organizations. For each contested term in the field, the concordance records three things: how the term is defined in the field's foundational texts; how journals in each neighboring discipline (sociology, literary studies, law, education, public health) currently use it; and where the definitions diverge. The single wedge is eliminating cross-disciplinary definitional drift — the failure mode in which the same word carries materially different meanings in the field's foundations versus a neighboring discipline's current usage. It is deliberately not a dictionary: it maps variance and change rather than legislating one authoritative definition, which is exactly what standard-setters cannot do themselves at speed.

Why now

The new overview [0] establishes the two conditions under which static glossaries fail: the field is "notoriously hard to define" (contested at any given moment) and "fast developing" (shifting over time). Corpus evidence shows the drift mechanism in practice: when poststructuralist identity theorising crossed into second language acquisition [3], terms such as "investment" and "subjectivity" were re-theorised for a new disciplinary home, so identical vocabulary now carries field-specific meanings — the exact variance a concordance must track. Organizations that maintain public glossaries and style guidance currently have no systematic way to see this variance or its movement, which is the gap the product fills.

Written by GLM · 12 Oct 2026

AI assessment

Backed by 2 papers77

A niche, high-precision terminology tracking service that solves a specific pain point for academic publishers and style guides, though it faces a small total addressable market.

Evidence strength
4/5
The idea directly leverages the provided research on the 'hard to define' nature of queer theory and the documented 're-theorising' of terms when crossing into SLA.
Market pull
3/5
While the named beneficiaries have a clear need for accuracy, the number of organizations willing to pay a subscription for a single-field concordance is likely very small.
Novelty & moat
3/5
It is distinct from the 'Field Entry Atlas' by focusing on terminology drift rather than onboarding, though it shares a similar disciplinary anchor.
Feasibility
4/5
A small team could build this using existing corpus linguistics tools and a curated set of foundational texts and journals.
Wedge clarity
5/5
The 'cross-disciplinary definitional drift' is a sharp, specific problem with a clear value proposition for style-guide editors.
Simplicity / focus
5/5
The product is focused on one specific output—a concordance and diff report—avoiding the trap of becoming a general-purpose platform.

Scored by Gemma 4 · 12 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.

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Who benefits

  • Human Rights Campaignorganization

    Maintains a widely cited public glossary of terms; a concordance that tracks fast-moving, discipline-varying usage keeps that glossary defensible and current.

  • American Psychological Associationorganization

    APA Style and its inclusive-language guidance must adjudicate contested terms; documented cross-disciplinary usage data is a direct input to its guidance updates.

  • GLSENorganization

    Trains K-12 educators who must use accurate, current terminology with students and families; the concordance feeds its training materials directly.

  • Duke University Presscompany

    Its editors standardize terminology across highly interdisciplinary submissions; a variance map shows which sense of a term an author is using.

  • University of Chicago Presscompany

    The Chicago Manual of Style must offer guidance on evolving terminology; documented cross-disciplinary usage evidence supports that guidance.

Research it builds on

  1. An Identity Approach to Second Language Acquisition
    Bonny Norton, Carolyn McKinney · 2026 · 140 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  2. Queer theory now from foundations to futures
    Hannah McCann, Whitney Monaghan · 2026 · 111 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
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feasibility