Strategic Curiosity: A Way to Awaken Awareness of a Common Future.

Intellectual strategies change in response to broader socio-political transformations of the world and the development of new means of communication. In today's complex and fragmented intellectual landscape, public intellectuals perform various functions and conceive different strategies. As traditional public intellectuals are finding it much harder to argue with authority, thought leaders, or new for-profit thinkers linked to ideologically driven think tanks, are getting new visibility. Yet another group, the 'new intellectuals', who in contrast to traditional public intellectuals housed at the university are detached from its institutional structures, contributes to the non-academic culture of criticism of neo-liberalism. As these three groups are not engaged in meaningful conversations, a work on the restoration of the severed links between wonder at the world and the imagination to think beyond the present is neglected. In the hope that all three groups of today's intellectuals, despite their different values and styles, can still place curiosity at the core of their strategies, this paper argues that primarily it should be a task of the traditional public intellectual to awaken people's awareness of a common future. It concludes that to re-empower the traditional public intellectual, there is a need to prevent modern universities from becoming places with little room for curiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]