Teaching hopeful political geographies through field trips

Fieldwork is a pedagogical tool that sets geography apart from most other cognate social science and humanities disciplines. How can it be used to teach hope? This paper discusses this using the example of an annual undergraduate trip to the divided city of Nicosia. It argues that the trip’s focus on possibilities for reconciliation both helps obviate what might otherwise become the danger of an academic version of “dark tourism,” and introduces students to real and hopeful examples of peacemaking in action.