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This article investigates efforts by a small regional university without a geography department to incorporate geography into its general education curriculum as part of a "quality enhancement" process mandated by its accreditor. Drawing on interviews and surveys of students and faculty, we highlight lessons learned that may be useful for institutions considering similar changes--including the importance of valuing disciplinary expertise, addressing faculty contingency, and engaging with existing research on geographic education and pedagogy. The initiative, while limited in significant ways, also suggests opportunities for advocates of geography to engage with agendas around general education reform and accreditation.

Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double‐bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis‐present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm. By writing from diverse encounters with Berlant's work, they move the concept in multiple directions, juxtaposing it with other optimisms across a variety of empirical scenes and locations. The result is a repository of what cruel optimism, and Berlant's mode of thinking‐feeling more broadly, offer geographers and others. In Part Two of Encountering Berlant, contributors engage with the promise of Lauren Berlant's most influential concept – 'cruel optimism'. By writing from multiple locations and empirical scenes, they find in the concept a new way of understanding the reproduction of everyday harms and damages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we make the case for the value of a less explored angle on space in Deleuze's work, which we call the topologies of space‐as‐difference. We highlight the Möbius strip as a central figure in his ontological system, and we show the significance of this topological structure both for understanding key Deleuzian concepts, such as the virtual and actual, and for understanding space and difference in productive ways. We demonstrate this by showing how Deleuzian topologies of difference enable us to further theorise the encounter – a key theme in recent geographical scholarship – as spatial and embodied, connecting up with material feminism and work on the skin, touch, and breath. We suggest that Deleuze's concept of space‐as‐difference thus contributes to the intensification of relational and topological approaches to space that are currently shaping the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which difference is understood. We argue that geographers could helpfully extend their theorizations of difference through Deleuze's philosophy of 'difference-in-itself'. We examine the value of a 'difference-in-itself' that views difference as generative, originary, and primary, in productive tension with conceptions of difference that tend to, purposefully or otherwise, subordinate difference to presupposed identity-based, representational categories, or dialectical forms of contradiction and opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper mobilizes an Arendtian understanding of politics emphasizing plurality and appearance in order to examine a series of projects convened by the City of Sydney council between 2010 and 2013 that were intended to address issues faced by queer people from “culturally and linguistically diverse” communities. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as archival materials, I argue that these efforts carved out spaces in which racialized queer people in Sydney could appear politically and in which the uneven geographies produced by the mutually constitutive regimes of sexuality and race could become an object of differentially shared concern. Yet, these projects were themselves necessarily shaped by the very dynamics of racialization and normativity to which they responded, and the paper asks how we might differently live with and beyond the fantasy of multicultural queer inclusion at work in these efforts. In doing so, this paper suggests a different way of relating to the binaries (radical/assimilationist, disruption/recognition, state/non-state) that have informed many queer analyses and also contributes to literatures in critical urban and political geography that seek to develop contextually-sensitive understandings of politics that can account for more modest forms of political engagement with existing orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Jacques Rancière's conception of the partition of the sensible to interrogate the aesthetic regimes and spatial coordinates that animated public debate about Park 51-the Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. Understanding conflicts over mosques as potential struggles over the conditions of membership in a community, I suggest that many of the arguments in favor of Park 51 reinforced a partition of the sensible in which Islamophobia could resonate. At stake in these debates-which turned on different understandings of the distance that separated the proposed center from the WTC site-is the relationship between American Muslims and the narratives of trauma constructed around the September 11th attacks. I conclude by exploring the projects proposed by Park 51 organizers as potential sites of everyday micropolitics that could subtly 'jolt' existing orders in the interest of reconfiguring the 'common sense' of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]