This chapter challenges that claim that intellectuals comprise an elite class that possess a unique capacity to raise difficult questions and challenge the status quo. Nabil Echchaibi draws on his own collaborative work with scholars and artists on the questions of immigration, borders, and frontiers to suggest that scholarship is enriched when subjects are invited in as collaborators. He argues that scholars need to collective re-imagine research as a collaboration across a diverse set of expertise and genres, work that embraces the obliqueness of knowledge with the hope of producing an “other” form of knowledge that goes beyond the intellectual boundaries and epistemic and linguistic limitations that shape media scholarship. Rather than making our work more accessible to the public, he argues, we should be working with publics in order to transform our work to be more relevant and therefore more readily heard to publics beyond academia.

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.