Marginalia

Words by Charlotte Guest, Publishing Officer at UWA Publishing

As Sean Kelly wrote in a recent article for The Monthly, our public debate and mainstream media coverage has become increasingly simplistic. We have misplaced the tools for navigating complex topics; there seems to be no time for reflection. This can be said of issues for contemporary Australia as diverse as the refugee crisis to the housing crisis and the terrorism crisis. The point is they’re all ‘crises’; more and more, we are accessing these subjects through the language of extremes; we are witnessing a growing propensity to shy away from deep and sensitive analysis. As, at its core, this is largely a problem with language-use and communication, it is unsurprising that one of its victims is a primary communicative tool: the book.