My good friend and colleague, Robert Frodeman, has a new book coming out from Palgrave Pivot. Here is a little taste from the Introduction to Sustainable Knowledge

A Parable…

In Walden, Thoreau tells the story of an Indian who goes door to door in Concord selling the baskets he’s woven. But he finds no buyers: while the baskets were beautiful, the man had not taken the trouble to make them worth the while of his neighbors. Academics have taken a similar approach to knowledge. They too have produced objects of great subtlety and beauty. But they have not tried to make their research relevant to anyone beyond their 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.”Thoreau sketched out the basics of a disciplinary approach to knowledge production. It’s an approach that, whatever its merits, is breaking down today. Increasingly academics find their productions criticized and dismissed, their work habits called to account, and their funding cut. Society, it seems, feels like it is getting a poor return on its investment in university research.Sustainable Knowledge offers an account of this trajectory, the growing quandary in academic knowledge production that reveals itself in terms of the demise of disciplinarity.

via Sustainable Knowledge by Robert Frodeman.