Here, I've created an example that does just that. I want the figure to appear immediately after the bold text. Even if a lot of whitespace is placed and the figure appears on the next page, that is fine, but I don't want the next group of text to appear until *after* the figure. This is really confusing my readers.

\starttext
    \input knuth
    \input knuth

    {\boldface This is a short note about the picture. It should appear right after this.}
    \placefigure[here,force]{caption}{
        \externalfigure[1.jpg][width=\textwidth]
    }