 Mind and Body: From René Descartes to William James | "Stringless Gifts": |
 Cary Sober, No Strings Attached |
Anne Dalke and Paul Grobstein
"Intellectual property is an oxymoron."
Mark Lord, Director of Theater, Bryn Mawr College
...how could we arbitrarily refuse them information--since we couldn't undo that first tremendous gift of technological specifics? I think the point is that it wasn't a gift. There was a price on it:....The Akans saw that as usury. They refused to pay it. Ever since then, we've actually given them more information than they asked for...we've always given it freely, offered it to them. But Akans pay for value received. In cash, on the spot. They've been waiting for decades for us to tell them what they owe us. Till we do, they'll distrust us...so we ask them for information in return....They have a treasure we want. Tit for tat.
Ursula LeGuin, The Telling
In a year-long series of interdisciplinary conversations about "The Culture of Science," faculty and staff at Bryn Mawr College returned repeatedly to questions of intellectual property: both what it means to "own" an idea, and the profit that can arise, in this entrepreneurial era, from doing so. The outcome of our conversations, presented here, is a story with a different slant: an account of the role that can be played in a market-driven system by faculty members who value research driven by investigators, teaching driven by inquiry, and learning driven by students. We here claim an alternative economics for conceptualizing these kinds of work, an understanding of our relationship to knowledge that is entirely different from that of ownership. As we imagine the most empowering image available to us for the sort of work we like to do, we have come to understand ourselves neither as marketers of information, nor as providers of service, but as producers of knowledge who refuse to engage in its commodification. We have come to think of ourselves as the bearers of freely-given gifts.
We have a lot to talk about here, and it will take some time to get it all in. We begin with the commodification of knowledge, an analysis of both the limitations of intellectual freedom and the estrangement of labor that such a form of teaching and learning entails. We examine in particular the prototype of the market economy closest "home" to us: how we teachers engage in trade, not only in industry but also with our students, which 1) is sometimes desired by both parties, sometimes not; 2) for which we always expect return and 3) which involves thereby the commodification and estrangement of ourselves from ourselves.
We arrive then at the center of our argument, the offering of an alternative dynamic: a form of gift-giving grounded neither in the economic assumptions of commodity-trading nor in a logic of contractual reciprocity, but rather in the inevitability and pleasure of generous public expenditure, which can be both socially generative and enormously self-gratifying. We explore one particular application of this idea, a virtual place where this premise is already being enacted on our campus: the large website Serendip.
The alternative, "heliotropic" (tree-based?!) pedagogy exemplified by Serendip takes as its point of departure an understanding of entropy, the process described by the second law of thermodynamics (alternatively: from photosynthesis, the symbiotic interaction of trees which don't NEED, but do make USE of, the sun's energy. The relationship of trees to sun is one of interdependence that entails no expectation. This unconscious affiliation is key, both conceptually and metaphorically, to our analysis.) Entropy-driven, spontaneously-occurring, non-goal-directed exploration becomes in this essay what it already is, somewhat paradoxically, in our praxis: an image and model for moving beyond the estranged labor of current educational practices, beyond the dynamic of exchange (both wanted and unwanted, rewarded and unrewarded) that takes place between researchers and industry and between teachers and students.
We are describing here active knowledge-production that (we expect) can prove useful in numerous contexts beyond the classroom. We claim, in conclusion, that stepping outside the structure of contract and commodification, beyond its inevitable dynamic of expectation, reward, punishment and disappointment, may enable us, as teachers and institutions, to invite, acknowledge and (more graciously?! /profitably!?!) receive what is freely available, and what might as freely circulate.
I. Faust Commodified
In three or four years when the question is asked, 'What did you learn?' the wrong answer is, "We learned a lot"....The right answer is, "We learned a lot a now we have the following deliverables for you. . . ."' It is a notable occasion when the director of an NIH institute publicly holds himself, and the scientists whom his institute supports, accountable for finding solutions to specific public-health threats within a given time frame. [This] statement contrasts with the NIH's long tradition of emphasizing the support of investigator-initiated research in the basic sciences, which is far less often guided by the pursuit of 'deliverables.'
Jessie Gruman, "Basic vs. applied Research: Finding a Balance." The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 28, 2003).
...greed as motivation (positively or negatively) presupposes capitalism. Lave and McDermott propose 'ambition.' I wonder what would happen if a positive word was used: thirst for knowledge? The problem may be that the kinds of analysis that might replace political economy/educational establishment will have to recognize the Faustian aspect of our cultural bargains.
Herve Vareene, Commentary on Lave and McDermott, "Estranged Labor/Learning"
The Chronicle has been full up, the past year, with a range of articles sounding the same lament: Jessie Gruman's March essay was followed, in April, by Derek Bok's commentary on "Academic Values and the Lure of Profit" and again in May by Robert Zemsky's query, "Have We Lost the 'Public' in Public Education?" Asking how willing universities have "been to accept money at the cost of compromising values central to the academic enterprise," how willing to pursue "ephemeral gains in the constant struggle for prestige," Derek Bok called for increased faculty involvement in developing and enforcing rules that protect academic values. Robert Zemsky had a similar query about what is lost "when higher-education institutions are shaped almost exclusively" by "businesses and government agencies seeking research outcomes": "the modern academy. . . has learned well to be market-smart, yet often at the expense of being mission-centered."
At a small college like Bryn Mawr, where the scientific culture is more akin to a "family business" than to the sort of 'tribalism" cultivated in sub-disciplines at large universities, such questions have a particularly strong resonance. We are trying to run our small business in the midst of a strong industrial science culture that has considerable resources and offers high financial remuneration, both to the students who graduate from Bryn Mawr to take jobs in industry, and to those of us who remain teaching at the college. Academic and industrial sciences are two distinctly different cultures with different age distributions, reward systems and attitudes both towards people and to time: industry is more results-oriented and more financially driven than is academia. This discrepancy in values raises two key questions for us: 1) Since academic provides the "on-ramp" for students going into scientific careers, what values are-should-we be passing on to them? 2) Industry extracts expertise from the academic world; do we want it to extract our culture as well?
As researchers become increasingly entrepreneurial, earlier conventions and moral obligations to disseminate research actively, and so generate its greatest use, have given way to material transfer agreements and legal obligations of confidentiality. In an era of scarce resources and pressure to be "first" in marketing intellectual property, tools are shared less openly and ideas held more closely. Under pressure of competition, the pace of science (as we understand the enterprise) slows; the use of contractual agreements that protect against promiscuous sharing contributes to a legalistic environment and detracts from the questioning and challenging that arises when unfettered curiosity drives the process. Finding commonality with industry diversifies academic income, but results also in diversified pressure on academic product. The risks inherent in this particular strategy of "going where the funding is" involve a reduction in academic freedom.
In repeated conversations about the nature of contemporary research and teaching, our interdisciplinary discussion group has explored a range of options available to us. As we discussed, for instance, the marketing of our pedagogical inventions, presenting our teaching as a commodifiable outcome of research-and so contributing to the objectification of knowledge, it seemed to us that attempting to create profits we can all share would have a chilling effect on the mentoring process by which one generation enables and learns from the next. The commodification of academic success would also compartmentalize much of what now occurs in harmonious interaction. For instance, we habitually and happily exchange "trade secrets" about pedagogy; as we accept incentives to privatize that knowledge in marketable forms, we find ourselves holding more tightly to our syllabi, assignments, classroom strategies, pedagogical philosophies-even our anecdotes.
The commodification of knowledge is, of course, a particular case of a much more general phenomenon: the commodification of virtually everything (art and medical care are obvious examples). Most of our culture assesses value based on return on investment in the short run, a poor foundation for supporting intellectual inquiry, and one which certainly complicates the life of intellectuals, since we need support (financial and otherwise) from the world in which we conduct our practice.
Academia offers a distinctly different culture of knowledge acquisition and use from that found in industry and government. It is from the position of that pointed and dynamic difference that we find ourselves seeking an alternative to overt economic self-definition, in which value is measured by criteria other than those which guide the admittedly messy, always contingent, essentially rhetorical estimation of "good work" to which we have heretofore held ourselves accountable. Knowledge elaboration is fundamentally a social activity, and proceeds best when there is the freest possible exchange of ideas in progress. Treating our ideas instead as mechanisms for gaining wealth-whether for ourselves or our institutions-not only seriously compromises that sharing but also puts great, undesirable pressure on the directions in which knowledge elaboration proceeds.
Of course there has always been a generative tension between the stability and security of economic development and the destabilizing novelty of creativity. The decision-making process of admitting creative students, for instance, has always been informed by questions regarding ability to pay, and the experience of current faculty on the Admissions Committee at Bryn Mawr has made a number of us acutely aware of market forces. But we have been re-convinced thereby of the need for us to choose to continue to be a place of public purpose. The replacement of an earlier complex pattern of competing values (including those of financial return) by a nearly monolithic acceptance of short-term financial return and economic development is detrimental not only to higher education but to other sociocultural institutions. We need to learn to think in very different terms-we need to think, in particular, on longer time scales--if we are to halt the disastrous practice of allowing short term return on investment to be the default value of education.
II. Estranged Labor/Learning
the worker feels himself only when he is not working. . . .His labour is . . . forced . . . . It is . . . not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself . . . . it belongs not to him to be another. . .the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human brain, and the human heart, detaches itself form the individual . . . so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity; It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self.
Karl Marx, "Estranged Labour"
If intelligence cannot be measured by how much a person knows the answers to standardized questions, but is better tested by what a person does when no one knows what to do, then high degrees of intelligence, of genius, should be virtually unrecognizable and certainly untestable by non-geniuses working at testing services. The world of tests offers no new terrain for brilliance and if it did, who would be able to grade it?
Jean Lave and Ray McDermott, "Estranged Labor/Learning" (19)
Jean Lave and Ray McDermott have re-read Marx's classic 1844 essay on "Estranged Labor" to construct a compelling description of learning in our schools as an "alienated practice":
Schools have commodified learning to the point that every learner must worry more about what others know than about what might be learned if people worked together;....every child...has to do better than everyone else . . . every learner . . . is alienated from his or her own learning by virtue of the dominant concern for what every person does and does not know relative, and only relative, to each other. Marx opposes a double-entry account books version of the human situation. (4)
Focusing on education as a "distributional phenomenon," substituting for Marxian private property both presumptions about "inherent intelligence" and the "controlled and standardized knowledge" that is our curriculum (9), Lave and McDermott develop a sharp critique of "the institutional arrangements that make an exaggerated attention to measured intelligence reportable, recordable, and consequential. . . . Learning becomes embodied in a credential, and being credentialed is a thing to become" (10, 22).
Lave and McDermott's essay explores at length the point we returned to repeatedly in our Bryn Mawr faculty discussion group. Academics and our students are not autonomous scholars; the work we do is highly governed by advising networks, social needs, funding and other economic forces. But Lave and McDermott's critique accords with the one we developed, over the course of two semester' discussion about "The Culture of Science": it is essential, in such a culture, to remember that the drive to do intellectual work is innate: intrinsic human behavior which, if left unfettered, will try things out and test them. Science, like all forms of exploratory learning, is curiosity driven, like the playfulness of children.
This does not excuse us, of course, from a responsibility to take its social applications into account in the work that we do. Acknowledging, with Dan Sarewitz, that science is both application-driven and market-focused, that it "maps very well onto wherever the current 'economic action' is," we insist still on a different sort of mapping: that science be guided less by current economic action, more by an unfettered pursuit of curiosity. Indeed, we would not even use the term "science" to describe research that is carried out to further commercial objectives. (To make such a distinction is to reclaim the etymological roots of both words, since science derives from a Latinate word meaning "to know"; the word "research" comes from a more goal-driven term, an old French word meaning "to seek out.") Seeking out "deliverables" in the short term means that we deny ourselves the long-term benefits of the primary business of science, which is to question and challenge (cf. Grobstein 2003).
As we do so, is imperative that we not isolate ourselves from the world: many of the most interesting intellectual problems arise there, where the kind of thoughtfulness which it is the business of intellectual communities to generate is very much needed. In fact, it is a significant part of our job to conceive of terms that may prove to be more favorable than whatever might currently be in fashion, and to educate others in them. It is to that task that we now turn our attention.
III. An Alternative, in the Freely-Given Gift
It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. . . . the law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. . . . He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Gifts" (25-26)
In capitalism, the all-determining factor is the exchange in the market. . . each person exchanges whatever he has to sell for that which he wants to acquire. . . . Fairness ethics means NOT to feel responsible for and one with our neighbor, but distant and separate; it means to respect the rights of your neighbor, but not to love him . . . . the practice of love must begin with recognizing the difference between fairness and love.
Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving (130)
Recently, a number of scholars in anthropology and sociology have used the social and ethical complexities of gift-giving to challenge the market rhetoric and exchange theory that have for so long dominated the social sciences. Many of them take as point of departure Marcel Mauss's landmark 1925 essay, The Gift, which studies a social phenomenon governed by norms and obligations (76). Much post-structuralist theory has reconceived Maussian insights. The most striking of these is Jacques Derrida's provocative claim, in Given Time: "Counterfeit Money," that the gift is impossible: from the moment the transaction is recognized, it becomes weighted with obligation, and so no longer qualifies as [a] pure present.
Departing from Derrida, it is our claim here that the "freely-given gift" functions precisely as a figure of differance within the current symbolic system of market exchange, and so points to what may lie outside it. Understanding what it means to give and receive gifts without the attachment of obligations can open up new possibilities for educational practice, and may enable us to rethink our notions of personhood, defining ourselves as autonomous, self-interested actors within a nexus of connections invites us into new ways of conceiving ourselves and our choices. Revising the stories we tell about the gifts we give and take may also help us revise the interactions which they facilitate.
It is commonly understood, as Andrea Friedman has said, that the relationship between colleges and students, and between teachers and their students, both have at their basis a contractual agreement: The student pays the college, and the college must meet, in return, a set of defined expectations, or else (in legal terms) the college has perpetrated fraud. The syllabus constitutes an additional contract. If the student fails to meet her responsibilities according to the contract, she flunks. If the professor fails to meet hers, she will be disciplined. We describe the exchange differently: not as seeking immediate gain or conventional profit, but as spending without any thought for the future.
Rather than looking at modern economy as based on necessity and utility, we move here in exactly the opposite direction: for us, as for George Bataille, "expenditure makes sense . . . as a gesture inevitably tied to, and leading to, an intellectual and moral potlatch " (Schrift 253). We have over the past several centuries created in a universe (of universities) which intervene in a natural human impulse to explore, and to share the fruits of our exploration; we are interested in re-creating, here and now, a university-indeed, a universe--in which people have an interest in disinterested generosity.
We are beginning to do so, at Bryn Mawr, in a number of forums, including a large website called Serendip, which exemplifies the sort of economy that, in Helene Cixous's terms, refuses to "accept the assumptions of conditions of scarcity as given," and substitutes for them an understanding of the nearly limitless human resources on which we have to draw. This is an economy which facilitates the free exchange of gifts; as Cixous explains, it "has a more supple relation to property . . . can stand separation and detachment . . . [and] can also stand . . . the other's freedom" (Schrift 12).
We are not foolish enough to argue that a women's college, founded in the nineteenth century, as Bryn Mawr was, in order to make available to women the educational opportunities and training which had hitherto only been available to men, can fully exemplify the "feminine economies" so provocatively described by Helen Cixous, economies
not constrained to giving as a means of free exchange in order to obligate a countergift in return; instead, they encourage giving as an affirmation of generosity... ...It is an economy . . . in which direct profit can be deferred, perhaps infinitely, in exchange for the continued circulation of giving . . . the positive value of plenitude. (Schrift 12)
Along with other institutions staffed by faculty who are interested in the unfettered exchange of knowledge, Bryn Mawr already does quite a bit to facilitate such unimpeded circulation. According to Serendip's Evolving Web Principles,
The disorder of the Web is one of its greatest virtues. As a fundamentally decentralized system of information exchange, it makes available, to a much greater degree than any prior human institution, the widest possible array of information/ideas/perspectives in a diversity of forms which, for the first times, approximates the diversity of human users. Every effort [is here] made to maintain and expand the free and decentralized character of the Web. . . .The Web should be used to encourage human to further develop, as individuals, the capacity to pass their own critical judgments and to continually expand their own perspectives and understandings. . . .The interactivity of the Web is perhaps its most important characteristic. For the first time in human history, it is becoming possible for all humans to play an active role in world-wide cultural and intellectual interchange...everybody's ideas/perspective can be made available...people can develop their ideas and perspectives in extensive interaction with other people.
The Web Weaving portion of the site further explains that
Like all biological systems, humanity depends for its success on the diversity of its elements. . . . One of the great significances of the Web (perhaps its greatest significance?) is that it vastly increases the possibilities of locating . . . people whose concerns overlap with one's own, who can bring to one's own understanding new perspectives, and who are trying to do in and for the world things similar to what one is trying to do oneself. . . . Links among sites on the Web are a concrete representation of such emerging and evolving communities. Central to the sort of "web weaving" done on and by Serendip is a conception of interdependence without the "stringiness" of expectation, obligation, or commodification. The presumption throughout the site is that this is not a zero-sum game, not a closed system-and that it therefore need not be a competitive one.
Various models of how knowledge elaboration can gain financial support without commodification or competition already exist: Public radio and television have been doing this with varying degrees of success for years. A variety of new and related business models are now being tried out on the internet: free information is provided as a mechanism to demonstrate to people their need for additional services, for which they will pay. For instance, Serendip offers a range of forums for discussion and a continually developing set of resources that explore intellectual and social change. It provides lots of information, including the course syllabi of those who share a sense of commitment to the free flow of information. The absence of charges upfront makes visitors to the site more inclined to share their own products. . . and perhaps eventually to donate money, attend Bryn Mawr, and turn to the Bryn Mawr community as a resource which they will be willing to pay for needed services.
The pattern we are describing is not, however, a common one, even (or perhaps particularly) in the most elite of schools. In Black Ice, her autobiographical account of her transplantation from her black Philadelphia neighborhood to a formerly all-white, all-male private school in New Hampshire, Lorene Carey traces the education of child who arrives bearing her gifts she is eager to share, but is soon instructed into a system of exchange in which one gift is always compared with another, and so always found wanting. Two years after she tells us, "I had come not just with my hat in my hand, a poorly shod scholarship girl, but as a sojourner bearing gifts, which were mind to give or withhold . . . I took the offense and bore my gifts proudly" (195, 196), she reports graduating with a very different attitude, one marked by insufficiency and need:
I shushed the greedy girl within. Starved for some special notice, she stood inside my skin jumping up and down. . . . I heard her clamor. I heard how deeply she had been hurt to receive nothing. . . . the girl inside was too immodest, too grasping and loud. . . . I look down into my lap as if folded hands could save me from the discomfiting need within. . . . the greedy girl inside me . . . was heartbreaking to look upon, a spoiled child at a party grabbing up expensive gifts, no sooner opened than found wanting, grabbing up new ones, hoping for one that would seep into and fill up her soul . . . I was glad of the award in my lap, even though I was no longer satisfied with it. . . I suspected that it was a booby prize (216-219)
We have been exploring here, of course, a alternative sort of economics from the one Lorene Carey describes as being operative at her graduation ceremony (and deep within her psyche). It is a form of exchange which enables independence and interdependence without necessitating either a structure of obligation or one of competition for limited resources. Our model for doing that, far from being based on conventional understandings of "intellectual property," draws for metaphor and inspiration on the free interaction of trees and the sun . . . .(?)
Query here about the "shadow" side of this phrase "unlimited resources": It has the sound of exploitation. It sounds/non-ecological. Can we go for something more like "sustainability"???
IV. The Lesson of the Trees: Learning to Become Unconscious
From the crooked timber of humanity," wrote Kant, "nothing straight was ever ashioned." From the squishy life-stuff of humanity, nothing nonbiological was ever fashioned. Even the loftiest products of human imagination are, first, emanations of that....evolving critter known as Homo sapiens. And . . . those emanations . . . must accord with a kind of evolutionary straightness. Too much crookedness won't do.
David Barash and Nanelle Barash, "Biology as a Lens"
It is a question of arriving at the moment when consciousness will cease to be a consciousness of something; in other words, of becoming conscious of the decisive meaning of an instant in which increase (the acquisition of something) will resolve into expenditure; and this will be precisely self-consciousness, that is, a consciousness that henceforth has nothing as its object.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (rpt. Schrift 250)
Need here to talk here about symbiosis/photosynthesis/interaction/interdependence without consciousness of NEED
And then: to get from there to...here, to children freely offering gifts and to us perverted adults who don't... (seems a stretch)
V. The Gift of Free Exploration
Even when I do things for the sake of others
No sense of amazement or conceit arises.
It is just like feeding myself;
I hope for nothing in return.
In the cessation of craving, we touch that dimension of experience that is timeless: the playful, unimpeded contingency of things emerging from conditions only to become conditions for something else. This is . . . the unborn, undying, infinitely creative dimension of life . . . . To experience ourselves in the world as interactive processes rather than aggregates of discrete things (9, 88)
Buddhism Without Beliefs
All other-directed "investment' only distracts from a full reflective knowledge . . . .inherently conserving knowledge is itself only the erasure of knowledge, since it knows only the void of itself when it is not focused on other things. There will be, then, a constant sliding, as the model of knowledge . . . determined and imposed from within is inevitably and repetitiously "gone beyond" . . . in the direction of a nothing.
Georges Bataille (qtd. Schrift 253)
At the conclusion to his introductory essay on The Logic of the Gift, Alan Schrift asks what for us have now become a series of rhetorical questions:
Might we then retrieve gift giving from the economic necessities imposed upon it with an exchangist economy and reframe the practices of giving in an account that does not restrict transactions to private proprietary relationships in which loans and loans paid back masquerade as the bestowal of gifts? . . . And might such nonproprietary relations facilitate the formulation of an alternative logic of the gift, one liberated from the presuppositions of more classical exchangist logics that imprison gift giving within the constraints of the economic assumptions of commodity trading?"
With Schrift and his contributors, with Mauss, we look to recover "the joy of public giving; the pleasure in generous expenditure"(20) of the curious, exploring child whom each of us once was, and whom all of us teach.
In gratitude to Ann Dixon for The Telling; to Andrew Smolar for initial reflections on gifts freely given; to Cassandra Fraser for the suggestion that the model for detached giving is a Buddhist one; and to all our colleagues who participated in the 2002-2003 Brown Bag series, especially, in this particular strand of the conversation, contributors Kim Bentson, Ralph Kuncl, Xenia Morin, Katherine Rowe, Dan Sarewitz, Elliott Shore and Jan Trembley, whose talks and postings have fed our thinking and writing.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Rpted. The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan Schrift.
Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. New York: Berkley, 1997. .
Bok, Derek. "Academic Values and the Lure of Profit." The Chronicle Review (April 4, 2003).
Carey, Lorene. Black Ice. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Center for Science in Society. Bryn Mawr College. 2002-2003 Weekly Brown Bag Lunch Discussion: "The Science of Culture/The Culture of Science."
Cixous, Helene. Rpted. The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan Schrift.
Freeman, Richard, Eric Weinstein, Elizabeth Marincola, Janet Rosenbaum and Frank Solomon. : "Competition and Careers in Biosciences. Science 294 (December 14, 2001): 2293-2294.
Friedman, Andrea. E-mails. July 9 and July 10, 2003.
Fromm, Eric. The Art of Loving. 1956; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Grobstein, Paul. The Essential Link Between Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Grobstein, Paul. A Vision of Science (and Science Education) in the 21st Century: Everybody "Getting It Less Wrong" Together.
Gruman, Jessie. "Basic vs. Applied Research: Finding a Balance." The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 28, 2003).
Kovac, Jeffrey. "Gifts and Commodities in Science." Soundings 85, 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 347-359.
Kuncl, Ralph. "The Balkanization of Science." Center for Science in Society. Bryn Mawr College. 2002-2003 Weekly Brown Bag Lunch Discussion. September 11, 2002.
Lave, Jean and Ray McDermott. "Estranged Labor/Learning." Outlines 4 (1), 2002: 19-48.
LeGuin, Ursula. The Telling. New York : Harcourt, 2000.
Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labor." 1844; rpt. Marx on Religion. Ed. John Raines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
McDermott, Ray and Herve Varenne. "Culture as Disability. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26:323-348, 1995.
Morin, Xenia. "Scientific Cultures at my House: Academic vs. Industrial Life Sciences." Center for Science in Society. Bryn Mawr College. 2002-2003 Weekly Brown Bag Lunch Discussion. March 27, 2003.
Osteen, Mark, ed. The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Sarewitz, Dan. "Does Science Make You Happy?" Center for Science in Society. Bryn Mawr College. 2002-2003 Weekly Brown Bag Lunch Discussion. March 20, 2003.
Schrift, Alan, ed. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Serendip's Evolving Web Principles. January 2001.
Smolar, Andrew. "Reflections on Gifts in the Therapeutic Setting: The Gift from Patient to Therapist." American Journal of Psychotherapy 2002, 56 (1): 27-45.
Still, Judith. Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Varenne, Herve, Commentary on Jean Lave and Ray McDermott, Estranged Labor/ Learning.
Web Weaving: Any friend of ours. is.... Serendip. (December 2002).
Zemsky, Robert. "Have We Lost the 'Public' in Public Education?" The Chronicle Review (May 30, 2003).
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