Crossing Borders
Crossing Borders is the University of Iowa's academic response to the dynamism and distress ("globalization") in the world since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. It takes into account both the importance of theory and questions of research practice in foreign-area and international studies. See Crossing Borders' program description.
Mission Statement
Crossing Borders is:
- An interdisciplinary cross-area graduate training program in the social sciences and humanities that prepares doctoral students in 12 departments for dissertation research at the intersection of two or more cultures
- A unit within International Programs that closely collaborates with area studies and other interdisciplinary programs and with the Graduate College and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to promote interdisciplinary-international courses that benefit undergraduates as well as graduate students
- A continuing series of unique seminars and other courses that explore theoretical and practical issues arising from globalization, its historical antecedents, and contemporary accompaniments
- An annual Convocation that serves as a forum for the presentation of research by UI faculty and students and by distinguished scholars from our University and other universities
- A context for faculty research projects that explore complex expressions of politics, culture, and economics arising from, for example, war, labor migrations and enslavement, trade and accumulation under capitalism, diaspora and exile, religion, nationalism, tourism, patriotism, and artistic self- expression
- A set of overseas summer travel-seminars for faculty and students that result in rapid acquisition of functional regional knowledge, local contacts, teachable information and researchable issues
- One of a network of Ford Foundation initiated projects designed to revitalize university-based area studies