Abstract
In Walden, Thoreau tells the story of an Indian who goes door to door in Concord selling the baskets he’s woven. He finds no buyers: while the baskets were beautiful, the man had not taken the trouble to make them worth anything to his neighbors. Academics have taken a similar approach to knowledge. They too have produced objects of great subtlety and beauty. But in too many cases they have not tried to make their research relevant to anyone beyond a disciplinary cohort. They have mostly followed Thoreau’s path: “instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”
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Bibliography
Joy, B., 2000. “Why the Future Does Not Need Us.” Wired Magazine 8.04, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html, accessed October 1, 2013.
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Nietzsche, F., 1886/2003. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY, USA: Penguin Press.
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© 2014 Robert Frodeman
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Frodeman, R. (2014). Introduction. In: Sustainable Knowledge: A Theory of Interdisciplinarity. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303028_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303028_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45405-1
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