The overarching purpose of Extension is to facilitate the application of science to the broader public. To achieve this goal, the information we disseminate must be accurate, relevant, socially just, and beneficial, which requires rigorous evaluation to ensure (Braverman & Arnold, 2008; Monk et al., 2021). In this chapter, I demonstrate the complementarity of Extension and the process of research and evaluation by outlining the relevance of Extension as a (a) research-informed, (b) evidence-based, (c) culturally relevant, (d) interdisciplinary, and (e) public-scholarship enterprise. To illustrate each of these qualities of Extension, I will describe the ongoing development of a relationship-science dissemination program, Relevate. In its over 100 years of existence, Extension has been at the forefront of community-engaged, translational and transformative scholarship. The landscape of Extension has changed over time. However, shifts and challenges in engagement work can also represent new opportunities to be responsive and innovative. Extension is well positioned to continue carrying bringing research to the community and conducting impactful, innovative, and engaged scholarship.

This chapter summarizes the book’s aim, which is to explore how scholars working at the intersections of journalism, politics, and activism make sense of and relate to some of the most pressing issues concerning contemporary developments in media and public life. Matthew Powers and Adrienne Russell describe recurrent questions that confront scholars of media and public life, and then summarize the core themes explored in the volume, which are living in a datafied world, journalism in times of change, media and problems of inclusion, engagement with and through media, and the role of scholars.

This chapter argues that scholars need to transform their approaches to knowledge and knowledge production. Guobin Yang suggests that taking a view of communication as translation, as opposed to transmission, community, or ritual, makes central a recognition of difference. Drawing on Walter Benjamin (1968), he argues that, like translators, communication researchers can never overemphasize the ethos of openness and receptiveness to difference inherent to the work and the centrality to media scholarship of pedagogies on listening, learning, and attunement. The role of the communication scholar, he argues, is not just to translate the experiences of those we study, but also to learn from those experiences. He advocates the cultivation of methodological orientations that permit human subjects to teach about their own experiences, rather than explaining those experiences to them in academic jargon.

This chapter examines the field’s double-sided struggle for relevance: How media studies gets lost among academic disciplines, on one side, and how it fails to connect with publics, on the other. Seth Lewis scrutinizes the disconnect between the field of media studies and people’s deeply mediated lived experience. He approaches the topic three ways: First, conceptually, considering what questions scholars are asking and not asking as a way to explore the assumptions, worldviews, and theories driving the research that does and does not get done. Second, methodologically, delving into how scholars ask questions, to which groups of people, and gathering what kinds of data. Third, communicatively, asking for whom scholars undertake their work, looking particularly at how research is being communicated to multiple audiences and with what normative aims. Lewis highlights sources of disconnection by exploring well-researched media topics of central concern to publics – media bias, information inequality, and religious faith. He demonstrates the field’s failure to provide the public with satisfactory responses.

This chapter reviews the core issues raised in the book, and suggests points for further research. Silvio Waisbord discusses how media scholarship might best engage publics and how it might best intervene in shaping media and public life. Given the scope and scale of current change in the communication landscape, Waisbord calls on media scholars to revisit the analytical scaffolding and normative arguments that form the basis of the field. He calls on scholars to acknowledge and work to better understand the reality of fragmented media ecologies, heterogeneous forms of public engagement, and fractured public knowledge.