In environmental communication, audience engagement is an essential prerequisite for achieving persuasive aims. This article responds to recent interest in visual storytelling and emotionalization – purposeful display and elicitation of emotions – as engagement techniques. A case study of the 2020 Global Biodiversity Festival – part online science festival, part fundraising event – provides evidence of how these techniques are employed in environmental communication for biodiversity conservation. Informed by scholarship on affect, emotion, visual rhetoric, and environmental communication, the case study analysis shows how visual representations of nature, mediated experiences of nature, and accompanying narration orient festival audiences toward specific ways of seeing and feeling that foreground emotional commitments and draw audiences into potentially transformative encounters. The visual rhetoric and affective dimensions of the festival’s website, virtual fi eld trips, and multimodal presentations focus attention, create moments of connection, and call audiences to action. The case study analysis also reveals how the festival, planned in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, treats this crisis as a kairotic moment for encouraging awareness, care, and pro-environmental behaviors.

The aim of this paper is to raise questions about how cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment in the context of what is known today as the Anthropocene. In the discussion, I chart the current debates about the ecological in the humanities, with a particular focus on new materialisms, to argue that cinema can be fruitfully thought of as part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls the “arts of noticing”. I then turn to a consideration of the potential influx of affect theories on ecocriticism and film studies, before sketching out possible approaches to studying film from an affective, new materialist and postanthropocentric perspective. These approaches might have wider implications for rhetorical perspectives on cinema, especially for those investigating emotional appeals.

The present paper offers a subjective overview of approaches to affect. Research on affect accelerated in the last two decades within several disciplines, in response to different concerns and research questions, energized by new research in psychology and, more recently, neuroscience. But while affect studies scholars agree that emotions, amplified by the media, course through all social relations and electrify our entire bodies, scholars attracted to specific clusters of theories have little to say to each other. To remedy this situation, I attempt to bridge several seemingly incompatible strands of research on affects in psychology, cultural studies, and media studies, in order to bring out commonalities and patterns that may prove useful for reading literature and other cultural artifacts. Defining affects, I refer to the practice of tuning musical instruments to a specific pitch as an analogy for the way affects resonate from the macro to the micro levels of social life.

This article explores how rhetorically ambiguous speech acts can work as preventive negotiations of potential confl ict within a political party and how such acts can affect the ethos of the leader. I show how rhetorically ambiguous speech can be a way of performing rhetorical leadership and communicating a democratic ethos while motivating participation in a common action for ends understood differently by different audiences.