The increasingly complex and multifaceted issues surrounding communication and information policy may be best addressed through scholar-activist collaborations. Collaborative approaches have the potential to facilitate the formation of a more informed research and action agenda. However, the ability to effectively initiate and engage in collaborative research does not come without its difficulties. Philip Napoli and Minna Aslama's Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist

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... s for a Democratic Public Sphere compiles coverage of a diverse collection of scholar-activist collaborations and addresses the opportunities, challenges, and dynamics of collaborative efforts. The book is divided into five parts focusing on strategic collaborations that can address issues concerning media ownership research and regulation, the needs and opportunities of alternative and community media, the rights associated with communications infrastructure, and creating institutional support for scholar-activist collaborations. Part I of the book highlights the activities, needs, and effectiveness of advocacy organizations and how collaborative research efforts may better reveal the goals of public interest media advocacy and activism. One chapter in this section focuses on a collaboration between Dorothy Kidd, a scholar at the University of San Francisco, and Eloise Lee, a program director at the advocacy organization Media Alliance. Collaborative efforts were sought in order to understand how community members in San Antonio, a culturally diverse neighborhood in east Oakland, California, could utilize media to portray what they perceived to be the social, economic, and political inequities in their neighborhood. The collaboration helped to facilitate the design, implementation, and evaluation of a media-training program for women leaders, the development of a local digital media production and distribution site, and the integration of local perspectives into municipal and national broadband communication policies.