In a previous column I noted that the time is right for re-evaluation of the focus and mission of communication studies programs. I proposed several distinct but related directions for rethinking the role of the discipline and of communications scholarship and I want to take up two of these now:

1.) The rediscovery of relevance, or the return of the repressed in communication studies;

2.) The expansion of our definitions and criteria for scholarship to encompass more public engagement.

There have been some initiatives that exemplify both the challenges and the possibilities of scholarship that engages public issues and public actors. One important undertaking in the U.S. was the Necessary Knowledge program of collaborative grants in media and communication launched in 2005 by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) with funding primarily from the Ford Foundation (http://www.ssrc.org/programs/necessary-knowledge-for-a-democratic-public-sphere/). This project recognized the serious disconnects between policy-oriented scholars and the activists and policy advocates they might hope to support:

"Few academics worked closely with policy or social change actors, or produced research that was directly relevant to activist or advocate needs. Few activists and advocates had the time, training, or incentives necessary to produce or effectively use research. The slow pace of academic research guaranteed that research supply and demand were perpetually out of synch. Networks for sharing knowledge, defining research needs, and building linkages between issues tended to be improvised and temporary, dependent on a few committed individuals."

The SSRC project focused a lot of attention on collaboration with media reform activists, in particular the Free Press (an organization founded by academic Robert McChesney (U of Illinois) and activist journalist John Nichols), and other organizations attempting to stem the tide of deregulation pushed by the Bush-era FCC. This movement demonstrated the power and potential of citizen engagement and activism in domains previously dominated by lawyers, and contributed significantly to an unprecedented victory in rolling back the loosening of caps on station ownership enacted by the FCC in 2007-2008.

As heartening as such victories have been, the experience of the SSRC project also highlighted obstacles facing academics seeking to intervene in policy debates. One notable challenge is the inherently different time frames of scholarship and policy interventions. As SSRC president Craig Calhoun put it,

"Some social science should be directly responsive to public issues as they are already subjects of public debate or policy-making. To be effective, this must be something close to 'real time social science.' That is, it must bring knowledge into public discussion very quickly; it must accommodate the schedules of policy-making, not the ideal working conditions of scholarship."

Taking seriously the goals of encouraging scholarship capable of contributing to real time policy deliberations, and of training scholars willing and able to undertake such efforts, requires adjustments in our curricular models and in our methods of assessing and rewarding academic work.

In the field of sociology, Michael Burawoy’s call for a revitalized "public sociology" in his 2004 American Sociological Association presidential address inspired support along with predictable criticism. The public sociology Burawoy called for is "a sociology that engages with diverse publics, reaching beyond the university, to enter into an ongoing dialogue with these publics about fundamental values."

In making the case for more publicly engaged scholarship Burawoy emphasized two important but contradictory points:

1. A large fraction of graduate students enroll in our programs out of a desire to learn more about the possibilities of social change and, eventually, to contribute to effecting such change;
2. However, "How often have I heard faculty advise their students to leave public sociology until after tenure - not realizing (or realizing all too well?) that public sociology is what keeps sociological passion alive."

There is no doubt that there are real institutional and cultural obstacles facing those who wish to encourage and engage in publicly engaged scholarship, but there are also hopeful signs, such as the creation of an ASA Task Force for the institutionalization of public sociology that considered three key issues:

1. How to recognize and validate the public sociology that already exists;
2. How to introduce incentives for public sociology, to reward the pursuit of public sociology that is so often slighted in merits and promotions;
3. How to develop criteria to distinguish good from bad public sociology.

Similarly, the American Political Science Association established a Task Force on Political Science in the 21st Century charged to address two questions:

"Is political science positioned to embrace and incorporate the changing demographics, increasing multicultural diversity, and ever-growing disparities in the concentration of wealth present in many nation-states?

"Can political science do so within its research, teaching, and professional development?"

Something is in the air.

We must also improve our ability to communicate with audiences beyond the confines of disciplinary cohorts. We’re all familiar with the condescension if not contempt with which many academics view colleagues who address lay audiences rather than scholarly peers and graduate students. Writing about the challenges facing public sociology Herb Gans described a situation not much different for communication scholars:

"In sociology as in the other social sciences, people who consider themselves scientists first and foremost are often critical of colleagues who seek to communicate their science to the general public, if only because it has to be reframed and simplified to appeal to such an audience. When sociologists who are hostile to public sociology control the academic power structure, in sociology as in other social science disciplines, scholars whose work is looked down on as journalism are not likely to obtain tenure. A vicious circle operates here; the disparagement and discrimination that accompany public sociology are likely to end once there are more public sociologists, the general public has smiled favorably on their work, and the status and prestige of sociology have risen. However, few sociologists will want to put their career at risk until the stigmatizing of public sociology shows signs of declining."

One of the ironies of the hostility to writing that addresses a broad audience rather than a peer cohort is that one such audience is comprised of our undergraduate students (and even some of our graduate students and colleagues in somewhat distant corners of the discipline). As Janice Radway (Northwestern U) put it,

"The largest and most predictable audience for the material we generate is not composed of our professional peers. Rather it is made up of young men and women, aged roughly eighteen to twenty-two, ranged before us in the classroom, seeking not only professional middle-class validation, but often guidance and reassurance about the appropriate emotional, moral, and political standpoint to take with respect to a confusing and oppressive world."

Even as we expand the range of writing that is deemed worthy of acknowledgement and reward in the academic realm, we need to explore ways to make engaged scholarship count towards career advancement, including tenure. The recent Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative, chaired by Syracuse University president Nancy Cantor and California Institute of the Arts president Steven Lavine, addressed ways to "remove obstacles to academic work carried out for and/or with the pubic by giving such work full standing as scholarship, research, or artistic creation."

The recommendations of the Initiative focus on defining public scholarship and creative work; recognizing the importance of academic public engagement at the local and regional as well as the national and international level; developing criteria for evaluating and procedures for documenting projects jointly planned, carried out and reflected on by university and community partners; expanding the range of what counts as scholarly achievement, including public presentation of knowledge; broadening the definition of peer review to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of a faculty member’s public scholarly or creative work, by including reviewers from publics and audiences relevant to the achievements of the candidate.

Any attempt to redefine and broaden the traditional norms and criteria employed in the tenure review process - the inner sanctum of academic life - must contend with several distinct centers of power and organizational inertia. Leadership from the top is the first essential ingredient. But, while necessary, support from the top is certainly not sufficient. Departments are the locus of hiring, mentoring and promotion, and department chairs, deans, and personnel committees are all crucial gatekeepers. In other words, change will have to move from bottom up as well as from top down, neither will suffice alone.

One of the components of the Imagining America project is the Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program, that focuses on ways to encourage, mentor - and protect - graduate students who are engaged in public or community work, and who wish to incorporate these roles in their academic profile. In the context of sociology Michael Burawoy wrote, “many graduate students would never survive the ordeals of graduate school were it not for their ventures into public sociology - sometimes open, sometimes secretive. That is what gives their commitment to professional sociology its meaning.” I would venture the same observation about graduate students in communication that I have known and worked with over the years, and probably more now than in earlier periods.

At USC’s Annenberg School we have been able to provide institutional and collegial support for projects that engage faculty and graduate students in projects collaboratively created and conducted with community groups. The Mobile Voices project, launched with funding from SSRC’s Necessary Knowledge program and supported by the Annenberg Program on Online Communities, and then funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Nokia, was a collaboration with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create a more humane and democratic society by responding to the needs and problems of disenfranchised people (http://vozmob.net/en/about). The Metamorphosis Project, initiated by Professor Sandra Ball-Rokeach, has for more than a decade involved numerous faculty and graduate students. The project uses Los Angeles' many ethnic communities of both new and settled immigrants to understand the transformation of urban community under the forces of globalization, new communication technologies, and population diversity. Their goal is to make the communication infrastructure of daily life visible so that it can be employed by residents, practitioners, and policy makers to improve the quality of family and community life (http://www.metamorph.org).

As a natural outgrowth of such activities, for the past few years Professor Ball-Rokeach and journalist turned academic turned community advocate Barbara Osborn have been teaching a graduate course on "Research, Practice and Social Change" that bridges the divide between theory-based research and community-based advocacy. The course connects students with local community organizations with whom they will design and execute a research project.

Efforts such as these inevitably raise questions about the appropriate guidance and mentoring for graduate students who wish to incorporate public engagement in their academic studies and in their future careers. The Imagining America project acknowledges the challenges facing graduate students and junior faculty whose efforts and ambitions move beyond conventional academic boundaries. This is not a challenge we should minimize, but neither should we be afraid to tackle it, as it is just such ambitious undertakings that offer the possibility of cultivating an engaged scholarship.*

* The current issue of the NCA newsletter, Spectra, is a special issue on The Future of Academic Publishing that contains valuable articles relating to the topics I’ve been discussing here.