Observations of a Strange World
My Political Science Senior Capstone
In today’s digital age, thoughts can be fleeting and are often traceless. As the final project of my college years, I want to make a memento of everything I’ve learned in my college years; to visually and verbally document how learning about different sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues has shaped my worldview
Why did I do this?
This project explores sociopolitical issues that are larger than my experiences with them. I am only able to capture my own experiences, but different people will have different feelings about the phenomena I write about.
I want to explore all of the topics I have come to learn and care about in my 4 years of higher education experience; to finally unzip and explore many years of overlapping and persistent questions. This zine includes observations of current issues and opinion journalism on how these issues impacted our society, and how certain paradigms have shifted since its conception.
I hope this zine prompts readers to think about their own experiences and interactions with these social paradigm around us. A goal of this project will be to communicate the nuance of everyday life and to encourage us to engage actively in our civic duties and participate more effectively as global citizens.
The theme & my collection of op-eds
We indeed live in a society! With that comes a set of rules and constructs we have built our communities around. At its core, the way we live is the amalgamation of a series of historical international affairs events sown together.
I used my capstone project as an opportunity to explore answers to questions of how certain events evolved into current issues today. The topic of these op-eds may not overlap, but they all explore the deeper reason or meaning of some used-to behavior that prevails on a societal. These questions include:
- Trade your life for a living: how late-stage capitalism has inspired a life of existential dread and society’s toxic relationship with Productivity Maximization
- Our toxic relationship with productivity maximization: A war on hustle culture and pushing extreme limits
- Who gets to learn?: Exploring exclusion in academia and how the new generation is trying to reclaim the right to education for all
- Caring too much and not at all: Political amnesia and the news cycle as we know it
- The American Dream: Asian Expectations, assimilation versus dissolution of identity, and the Illusion of upward Mobility
- Choosing who to include: Parameters to owning an identity and why some want to close the door on their way in