  The arena of investigation of star formation and its scaling laws is slowly,
but consistently, shifting from the realm of luminous galaxies to that of faint
ones and to sub--galactic regions, as existing and new facilities enable
investigators to probe regions of the combined parameter space of surface
brightness, wavelength, and angular resolution that were inaccessible until a
few years ago. We summarize what has been accomplished, and what remain as
challenges in the field of galactic--scale star formation.
