Welcome and introduction to the site.

Welcome to Beyond Borders Online!

Welcome to Beyond Borders Online, the site that accompanies and complements Beyond Borders: A Cultural Reader. Both the textbook and the online versions of Beyond Borders help students become critical thinkers, readers, and writers by investigating the borders that construct our worlds and that hold together the United States and its people. Beyond Borders Online specifically helps students use the World Wide Web to do electronic fieldwork—in relation to the readings and questions in the textbook's Chapter Activities—and to do Web Research Activities and Image Portfolio Activities on broad topics relevant to Beyond Borders. The electronic fieldwork questions raise the level of inquiry from chapter to chapter, and the Web research activities help students to consider multiple readings and visual selections at once.

What Do We Mean by Borders?

To say that our borders hold us together may seem a little odd. Normally, when we think of a border, we think of a division between two different places, such as a border between nation-states or countries. We usually think of borders as geographical lines having some kind of physical presence and/or some political meaning. Indeed, that kind of geographical and dividing border is one of the many kinds of borders addressed in this book.

But the idea of border implies much more than a physical division. A border in this site or in the textbook could be defined as any place where differences come together:

• national differences
• cultural differences
• social differences
• differences in values
• differences in language
• differences in gender
• differences in family heritage
• differences in economic status

What are Border Texts?

Even the readings that students work with in Beyond Borders and Beyond Borders Online are what we call border texts: places where our differences find expression. The readings in Beyond Borders present a wide variety of subjects, styles, genres, voices, and disciplinary orientations. In addition to essays, poetry, and other familiar genres, Beyond Borders includes some of the following:

• Hybrid Genres: A large number of the readings belong to hybrid genres that have proliferated in the last generation: essays that combine politics with autobiography or autobiography with cultural criticism.
• Visual Documents: Beyond Borders also offers a variety of visual documents for interpretation, which helps students extend both their analytical skills and their definitions of the word text.
• Hypertext and Readings in Cyberspace: Beyond Borders Online is devoted to helping students consider cyberspace as a vast and new field of borders and new kinds of text.

We provide electronic fieldwork activities and critical questions for all of the chapters in the textbook and for the Image Portfolio, and we provide Web research activities for the broad subjects that run throughout the textbook.

What Core Issues Do Borders Help Us Think About?

The electronic fieldwork questions and the Web research activities all develop, deepen, and expand the core issues of Beyond Borders:

• how persons derive and express individual identity
• how individuals form groups, and how groups express their collectivity
• how groups interact with other groups, and how they exist either harmoniously or in tension within larger social units such as nations and international communities