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The article focuses on the transitional workplaces in Alt-Meat and Beef Producer Health and Safety in the Kansas Flint Hills. Topics include using potential growth in the cultured beef industry to think about transitional workplaces; and Kansas beef-producers on small to mid-sized operations and ethnographic data to ask how increased consumption of cultured beef might impact the well-being of conventional beef producers on family farms.

I draw on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oceania to formulate the concept of 'charisma work', a type of labour in which the extraordinariness of individuals and their visions for the world are (re)produced and promoted to help legitimise rational-legal power. I focus on how two Pacific Island microstates, the Cook Islands and the Republic of Kiribati, work with Conservation International, an international environmental NGO, to build networks of charismatic people in support of the world's largest marine protected areas. I argue that an aim of charisma work in this case is to attract support and resources to meet the objectives of Pacific Island microstates caught in a double bind of balancing the right to internal sovereignty and the demands of extra-national partners and interests. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, I propose that rational-legal systems utilise charismatic processes to support authoritative claims while, at the same time, obscuring the egalitarian origins of institutional legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study follows the eight-year development of an environmental anthropology course, beginning with my own failure as a teacher to provide students an adequate way of thinking and acting amid planetary crisis. It then turns to a diagnosis of three challenges students face when thinking about global ecological futures: (1) an inability to act, (2) an inability to imagine how an individual can make a difference, and (3) an inability to conjure an adequate sense of hope. For each of these challenges, I introduced a conceptual metaphor designed to help us think anew, where a conceptual metaphor is a trope that enables thinking about one conceptual domain in terms of another. The metaphor of wayfaring helped us overcome the conviction that one must become an expert before acting. The metaphor of seed planting helped us reimagine how an individual can contribute to larger-scale change. Finally, I introduce two new conceptual metaphors for thinking about hope amid planetary crisis—weedy invasions and broken jars. By working with these tropes, I propose an alternative way of thinking about hope that does not rely on a sense of optimism. Along the way, I make two broad arguments. First, thinking through novel conceptual metaphors, what I call metaphor work, is a worthwhile technique for approaching planetary crisis with students. Second, an undergraduate seminar is an excellent place to experiment with new ways of thinking about, and living in, the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]