This article investigates the motivation informing President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s rhetoric regarding America’s lack of a direct military response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Employing Kenneth Burke’s pentad as its analytical lens, this study identifies how the president attempted to shape public opinion through his linguistic choices and selective interpretation of events. Biden’s rhetoric justifying the US’ non-military reaction to the conflict is found to reflect realism, and supports the claim that the US approach regarding the situation in Ukraine is an action policy. Furthermore, the results provide insight into the understanding of the working of the no-use-of-force rhetoric within the context of the still evolving post-Cold War world order.

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 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 paper examines a rhetorical case - Mother Teresa's narrative - for evidence of prophetic qualities, including social calls to action. Mother Teresa's story is considered through established methods of investigating prophecy, such as themes of announcements of judgment and reason and the Messenger formula. Her rhetoric is also examined through the theoretical lens of Walter Fisher's narrative coherence for evidence of biblical ideals and body language. Her lived experiences are also considered evidence of her prophetic nature. Mother Teresa's narrative is read and better valued as part of a wider context of social action consistent with prophecy.