In Pursuit of Validation

Aïda Eltorie

An application for a Scholarship
December 30th 2019

How will your college education help you achieve your goals?

In pursuing my Masters of Global Affairs, I intend to study the area of International Political Development due to its heightened focus on political economy. Rice University, and more contextually, Houston, would be a great host in developing my research on international cultural development and global affairs. Understanding the driving forces behind the economics, politics and cultural movements in the realm of external affairs is integral to the appreciation of international relations; specifically, to concentrate on the cultural tier of study, a field which deserves careful and thorough examination as intercultural dialogue and production, while seemingly secondary or derivative of both politics and economy, in fact play a primary role in how global affairs are created, interpreted, and defined.

What are the factors that cause such divergent outcomes in two otherwise similar microclimates, both comprised of alien or migratory cultures with recent histories? On a macro level, how is the digital global village equipped to accommodate the movements of permanent migratory cultures that developed since the post-war and post-modern era? What are the existing gaps in international policy that need to be filled towards the end of social enhancement for all community strata? These are the kinds of questions that I care to explore and elucidate answers towards through my professional development, specifically through the lens of cultural understanding and development.

The pursuit of this degree will offer my research a platform of discussion and application into global socio-cultural diplomacy from the micro to the macro-level, a role that I am passionate to evolve into. I have the opportunity to approach this from a background of curatorial practices in performing and visual arts, and have worked for over a decade with cultural activists using creative means to help navigate the understanding of cultural change. Heraclitus, fifth century Greek philosopher said “The only thing in life that is constant is change,” and I also strongly believe that determination is only the base of persistence and honest persistence is key in commanding good direction. 

Contemporary societies are constantly evolving, with the digital age and the movement of two or more ethnicities warped by a single individual (myself included), has given birth to a diversity that is both desired, and selectively negated when it serves an agenda to do so. I am interested to continuously identify the diversity and the negated, whether ethnically, politically, socially, sexually, in secularism, and non-secularist values. All identities have voices, but not all voices have rights or reason. 

To be the hand that chooses, is also the hand that is capable to tread on silence. An awareness of the silence, whether the oppressed or socially disabled, has to be as loud as the silenced, but the equality of rights is not it’s validation; reasoning is. Logic has, however lost it’s value since logic no longer carries the sensibilities needed to adopt – “social norms.” Behaviors have lost value when political arenas, for example have turned into doppelgängers that have come to present the counter-evil of reason rather than reason itself. Causing the sensibility of made-up truths to be at the forefront of reason, and no longer the truth itself, resulting in the concept of truth to become a lost validation to its own fabricated purpose.

Apply the concept of a falsified truth to a household. When identifiable relationships in a household who rely on codependency are also counting on a lack of honesty or manipulation to delude and pursue their own illusions of household jurisdiction, creates a falsified codependent environment. The same in an office environment where a lead might falsify their statements in order to manipulate their counterparts to sway executive needs instead of serving a wholehearted inclusion marked by good collective intentions can also invade a counter-well-being to that environment. Speaking and assuming without listening is an easy example to the art of such reoccurrences. Listening and counter-comprehending is an even further disqualification. A ripple of neglect and social abuse starts to appear in the human endeavor since the adaptation of the human kingdom is designed to react and respond in the environments created for them. Like theatre, it’s the backdrop to a planned performance, setting the stage for the act to come and manipulate a wider view. 

Pursuing this degree is not only a validation to what the program has to offer my goals, but how my vision and goals can proactively identify and serve reasoning well. Allow me to serve the idea with realization and not neglect. 

© Aïda Eltorie 2019