Editor's Foreword
by Katalin Orbán
Writing is often mistaken for a technicality, a mere recording of already formed ideas. This notion does not always hold true for something as humble as a shopping list, and it is certainly much less true for scholarly work, which almost never emerges instantaneously, ready to be written down. Interesting questions rarely have answers simple enough to be fully foreseen, so in forming a good understanding of the problem, one typically encounters new ideas and questions; good writing therefore takes shape through a process of rethinking one's basic idea. Strictly speaking, this is not Writing and Critical Thinking, but writing as critical thinking. This is what the essays presented in the inaugural issue of folio share despite their diverse topics: an aspiration to produce, rather than reproduce, knowledge and to rethink the already thought. The writers find puzzles in places one might pass by: they query what might be taken for self-explanatory facts (sea creatures on a souvenir magnet or the consumption habits of tai tais), and they bring into focus the unstated terms of a debate in order to envision alternatives (questioning the opposition of business practicality and cultural memory to imagine an ideal landscape for heritage conservation policy).
The title folio--the name of a single sheet of paper or parchment, from folium, Latin for leaf--is meant as a reminder of values that should be extended rather than erased by the new possibilities of digital culture. Writing in the digital age benefits from unprecedented search capabilities and the fast transfer of information, and writers can deterritorialize themselves as never before, being elsewhere and indeed anywhere, while connecting instantaneously with multitudes of other writers and readers. Along with the pleasures and advantages of these new possibilities, folio emphasizes the value of unhurried and precise thinking and a critical awareness of one's own position both within and outside the academic world. In this spirit, the magnified lines of a palm leaf that echo the original meaning of the word folio in the cover design are not only a declaration of the site of writing--tropical Singapore--but also an affirmation of what is best in the essays published here: arguments growing organically out of an intricate process of thinking and writing, grappling with a complexity that is there, but only if one looks closely, differently.