B2: Ecological Feelings: Reflecting on Care, Hope, Joy, and Optimism

Practitioners and scholars of rhetoric have long acknowledged rhetoric’s capacity not just to express a rhetor’s emotional state but to conjure feelings—to generate what some now call “public feelings,” feelings that can be and often are shared by people who may or may not be closely linked. Working within this tradition, contributors to this panel will demonstrate how ecological feelings are rhetorically generated and sustained, that is, how material-symbolic practices give rise to worlds in which particular feelings become more or less possible.