For several years I have taught a graduate class on critical human geography for incoming MA students. There is an inevitable tendency for such a class to settle for an inventory of oppressions and structural injustices, and the theories that expose them. And yet, and through no grand design on my part, it has felt like hope has somehow broken through. In this paper I will offer a preliminary set of thoughts on what might account for this outbreak of optimism, or at least a strong sense of community and common cause that leavens the sense of critical gloom. First, students’ own backgrounds and interests were incorporated into the course content so that their hopeful plans for thesis research, and a place in the academic world, were reflected. Second, the course material consciously emphasized examples of activist and engaged scholarship. Third, the class meetings created a safe space for discussion and the legitimizing of personal lived experience as a basis for participating in debates in critical human geography. Finally, personal engagements with authors/thinkers fostered a sense that the texts we were reading were the beginning an open conversation, not fixities within established literatures. Reflecting on these experiences, and including students’ own perspectives on the class, will perhaps offer some wider lessons for how a pedagogy of hope might sit alongside critical perspectives in human geography, and how Geography itself reproduces its transformative potential.