Communication strategies for classrooms, students, and scholars are easily adaptable

Kyle Conway is a professor of communication studies at the University of Ottawa. His third book, The Art of Communication in a Polarized World, asks, “How do we come to understand people who seem different from us?”

While in his previous books Conway focused on TV, The Art of Communication in a Polarized World “is more about strategies we can use” to more effectively engage with people who are different from us.

The Art of Communication in a Polarized World is addressed to his students and fellow scholars, but Conway’s style and language are both accessible and inviting. “Even though we’re not in a classroom together, the strategies I talk about are adaptable and applicable elsewhere,” he says.

The first of Conway’s strategies is misreading, which involves taking an established text and approaching it from a different angle, reading it in ways it hasn’t been read before. At its most productive, being willing to approach an established pattern slant-wise allows for the possibility of genuine reframing of a conflict and increased mutual understanding.

Conway demonstrates this by describing the way he might use misreading to convince his children to clean their rooms.

“Perhaps we make a joke out of the fact that it’s a script. We read it ironically. I say their lines, they say mine. In the end, if I’m lucky, we reach a point where we see their hesitation to clean as a result not of the work but of their frustration at repeating the script again, a frustration that’s dissipated through humour. Or I see my insistence as a result not of the dirty floor as such but of my need to feel dad-like, and I can cut them some slack.”

The second rhetorical strategy is invention. “According to Aristotle,” Conway says, “anyone can learn the tools of rhetoric and invention, which is really just figuring out what you need, what you have on hand, and how you can use it to persuade someone.”

Both of these strategies have a dark side. Misreading, as Conway demonstrates in his discussion of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “can also be used to loosen people’s grip on what they think they know. Gaslighting is a form of misreading.”

Invention, too, can function not as persuasion but as provocation. As an example, “Trump has worked to impose a victim frame (or even a revenge frame) on his impeachment acquittal, in contrast to the democracy (or corruption) frame Democrats have tried to advance,” Conway says.

“I don’t think either side will persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with them, but that’s the polarization I hope to address.”

This “need to compete, to win, to beat people we see as political opponents” is what Conway sees as the root of our culture’s polarization. The remedies he proposes to our cultural and political polarization are based in curiosity, playfulness, and ethical commitment to one another.

“Misreading is a knife that cuts both ways,” Conway says, “which is why we must also think about our obligations to the people we’re talking to.”