Kyle Conway – författare

Boomtowns are difficult places to live. North Dakota, long familiar with oil’s boom-and-bust cycle, became the epicentre of an extraordinary rush in 2008: towns doubled in size almost overnight, and community life was transformed by extraordinary wealth, but also by strain and conflict.Kyle Conway traces the most recent boom within a longer North Dakotan history – from the arrival of settlers in the late nineteenth century, through mid-century oil rushes in the 1950s and 1970s, to the explosive growth after 2008. The book focuses on Williston, the commercial centre of the Bakken Formation, a vast shelf of oil-soaked shale made profitable through hydraulic fracturing, which drove a population surge between 2008 and 2014. Alongside opportunity came traffic jams, housing shortages, and tension between newcomers and longtime residents. Amid this upheaval, people devised new ways of living together, often rooted in care, hospitality, and the resilience of those who had weathered previous transformations.Drawing on interviews, historical records, data analysis, and his own lifelong ties to the region, Conway shows how the petromodern paradox – the logic of b“solving” the problems created by oil with more oil – fueled both opportunity and conflict at ground level in a community transformed by oil exploration. At Home in the Petromodern Paradox asks what the Bakken can teach all inhabitants of a an oil-fueled world about the contradictions of petroleum dependency and offers a fragile but real sense of hope.

The idea that the American Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies are just "fly-over" country is a mistake. In the post-9/11 era, politicians and policy-makers are paying more attention to the region, especially where border enforcement is concerned. Beyond the Border provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the region's increasing importance. Drawing inspiration from Habermas's observation that certain modern phenomena - from ecological degradation and organized crime to increased capital mobility - challenge a state's ability to retain sovereignty over a fixed geographical region, contributors to this book question the ontological status of the Canada-US border. They look at how entertainment media represents the border for their viewers, how Canada and the US enforce the line that separates the two countries, and how the border appears from the viewpoint of Native communities where it was imposed through their traditional lands. Under this scrutiny, the border ceases to appear as self-evident, its status more fragile than otherwise imagined. At a time when the importance of border security is increasingly stressed and the Great Plains and Prairies are becoming more economically and politically prominent, Beyond the Border offers necessary context for understanding decisions by politicians and policy-makers along the forty-ninth parallel. Contributors include Phil Bellfy (Michigan State University), Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin), Brandon Dimmel (Western University), Zalfa Feghali (University of Nottingham), Joshua Miner (University of Iowa), Paul Moore (Toronto Metropolitan University), Michelle Morris (University of Waterloo), Paul Sando (Minnesota State University Moorhead), and Serra Tinic (University of Alberta).

In 2007, Little Mosque on the Prairie premiered on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation network. It told the story of a mosque community that worshiped in the basement of an Anglican church. It was a bona fide hit, running for six seasons and playing on networks all over the world.Kyle Conway’s textual analysis and in-depth research, including interviews from the show’s creator, executive producers, writers,  and CBC executives, reveals the many ways Muslims have and have not been integrated into North American television. Despite a desire to showcase the diversity of Muslims in Canada, the makers of Little Mosque had to erase visible signs of difference in order to reach a broad audience. This paradox of ‘saleable diversity’ challenges conventional ideas about the ways in which sitcoms integrate minorities into the mainstream.

In 2007, Little Mosque on the Prairie premiered on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation network. It told the story of a mosque community that worshiped in the basement of an Anglican church. It was a bona fide hit, running for six seasons and playing on networks all over the world.Kyle Conway’s textual analysis and in-depth research, including interviews from the show’s creator, executive producers, writers,  and CBC executives, reveals the many ways Muslims have and have not been integrated into North American television. Despite a desire to showcase the diversity of Muslims in Canada, the makers of Little Mosque had to erase visible signs of difference in order to reach a broad audience. This paradox of ‘saleable diversity’ challenges conventional ideas about the ways in which sitcoms integrate minorities into the mainstream.

People's minds are hard to change. In North America and elsewhere, communities are fractured along ideological lines as social media and algorithms encourage individuals to seek out others who think like they do and to condemn those that don't. This social and political polarization has resulted in systemic discrimination and weaponized communication trends such as gaslighting and fake news. In this compelling new book, Kyle Conway confronts the communication challenges of our modern world by navigating the space between opposing perspectives. Conway explores how individuals can come to understand another person's interpretation of the world and provides the tools for shaping effective arguments capable of altering their perspective. Drawing on the theory of cultural translation and its dimensions of power, meaning, and invention, Conway deepens our understanding of what it means to communicate and opens the door to new approaches to politics and ethics. An essential guide for surviving in our polarized society, this book offers concrete strategies for refining how values and ideas are communicated.

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.