"Seventeenth-century village astronomers, missionary meteorologists, Victorian amateur botanists, industrial investigators, modern-day think tankers, local archaeologists, freelance family historians, Internet bloggers and debaters, and many others - through a range of fascinating cases complemented by overview analysis, this multi-author volume reveals the extent and vitality of the often invisible researchers who operate outside the university." "It provides a startling rebuttal of the conventional notion that the university is the primary site for knowledge production or that 'research' can and should be delimited within academically policed boundaries. The most creative and untrammelled researching today may be outside the universities, among other things exploiting the dialogic space of the Internet to bypass traditional academic controls over the production and validation of knowledge." "This interdisciplinary and transhistorical volume will interest - and challenge - all readers concerned with the theory and practice of higher education and lifelong learning; the organisation of research; the sociology and history of knowledge; and the implications and research of 'the knowledge society'."--Jacket.