• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

In this candid and concise volume, Kyle Conway, author of The Art of Communication in a Polarized World, considers how we can open ourselves to others and to ideas that scare us by reading difficult texts. Conway argues that because we resist ideas we don’t understand, we must embrace confusion as a constitutive part of understanding and meaningful exchange, whether between a reader and a text or between two people.

Building on the work of hermeneutics scholar Paul Ricoeur, Conway evaluates the recurring paradox of miscommunication that results in deeper understanding and proposes strategies for reading that will allow individuals give up the illusion of certainty. In elegant and compelling prose, Conway introduces readers to the idea that it is through uncertainty that we can gain access to new and meaningful worlds—those of texts and other people.

Kyle Conway is an associate professor of communication at the University of Ottawa. He has published widely on communication and translation, including the books The Art of Communication in a Polarized World (2020), Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation (2017) and Everyone Says No: Public Service Broadcasting and the Failure of Translation (2011).

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