Rooting the Study of Communication Activism Page 115 Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning & Civic Engagement Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 2015 Rooting the Study of Communication Activism in an Attempted Book Ban Spoma Jovanovic, Mark Congdon Jr., Crawford Miller, and Garrett Richardson Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning & Civic Engagement Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 2015 Cultivating deeply rooted community partnerships is vital to the mission of teaching and scholarship that answers the call for robust civic learning and democratic engagement. This paper recognizes that such teaching and research, particularly when it delves into political and contested questions, may provoke criticism and skepticism. So, for those scholars and their students who enter the fray of political action, we argue that the move may be eased and nurtured with strong, sustained university-community partnerships built upon support, action, and, importantly, a commitment to common cause. We argue that unexpected moments in public life can create opportunities to stretch and strengthen those relationships to invigorate our democracy if we have done the work previously to think about, express, and challenge our thinking about what we owe to our communities. For academics, "going public" is risky business (Hartnett, 2010). That is, when we use our academic training to think and do the work of democracy that we teach our students, we can encounter resistance and face scrutiny for crossing over into the unknown territory beyond the walls of the academy. The implied critique that engaged scholars must resist from their colleagues is that higher education is supposed to be a "sanctuary for thinking apart from the interests and demands of the world" (Giles, 2012, p. 58). This essay recognizes that "going public" can provoke criticism and skepticism, even from our scholarly peers, despite a robust movement challenging our nation's colleges and universities