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The University of New Mexico (UNM) is home to a robust Department of Geography & Environmental Studies (GES). With curricula and research programs that span both environmental studies and geographic information science, the department covers topics of local, regional, hemispheric, and global interest. And yet enrollment is on the decline, as reflected across many public universities, in geography and many other disciplines. As it becomes more challenging to secure enrollment across the arts and sciences, UNM GES has worked to update and rename existing courses, while also developing new courses to attract and educate more undergraduates. One of the more successful efforts in this vein--originally prompted by faculty and student interest in Albuquerque's craft beer boom--is a new undergraduate course Geography 180: World of Beer. In this article, the authors summarize the course history, format, and approach, offering it as a useful template for building student interest and showcasing departmental courses and faculty. Further, the authors discuss how "World of Beer" provides diverse and essential learning outcomes for 100-level undergraduate students, regardless of their major, and how embracing local issues and off-campus entities generates a broader sense of community.

This article examines the impacts of Ecuador's 2014 water law on comunas ancestrales (traditional communal Andean villages), highlighting a disconnect between formal legal frameworks and day-to-day implementation. We focused on the case of Oyacoto, a peri-urban, Indigenous and Mestizo comuna struggling to maintain water management practices and identity while updating critical infrastructure. Using a qualitative approach, we studied the political and gender dimensions of responding to new water policy. Our findings highlight the challenges that small agricultural communities face to preserve community-based water planning within the constraints of centralized national policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter provides short messaging updates for fast dissemination along with retweeting and directed-following functionalities for user interaction, which makes it a popular tool for institutional outreach activities. This study analyzed U.S. geography departmental Twitter accounts and tweet histories through spatial–temporal analysis, frequency analysis, text mining, and network analysis. Although the tweeting frequencies; numbers of friends, followers, and mutual friends; and percentages of retweets and tweets with at-mentions or hashtags varied among departmental Twitter accounts, the account quantities, temporal tweeting patterns, and connection patterns among departments were generally reasonable. To improve outreach performance through Twitter, a geography department can (1) tweet more frequently; (2) actively discover, follow, and listen to its target audience consistently; (3) use at-mentions more frequently to interact with other accounts, especially professional organizations (e.g., the American Association of Geographers), geography departments, university programs, and active Twitter users; (4) tweet with suggested hashtags, including popular geographical research topics, popular events, organizations, and conference hashtags; (5) include community buzzwords when drafting tweets; (6) search, like, and retweet popular topics in the community; (7) follow and become mutual friends with more peer institutions; and (8) hire or designate a social media coordinator to implement these suggestions consistently and strategically. Key Words: data mining, geography departments, institutional Twitter usage, outreach, social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space could make further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historical and cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scholarship into outer space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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