The unit will focus on transparency in the world of transport, with a view to safety and environmental impact. These issues have come to the forefront of the current debate due to trends in industries such as airlines where booming travel demand led to the birth of low-cost carriers, and automobiles where electric and digital transformation is underway. As a highly regulated sector, safety and environmental issues concern not only transport services and industrial production, but also the institutions involved in air, rail and road transport. Sustainable mobility is central to the European green deal, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% in 2050. Yet emissions are still a key unresolved issue of the Paris Agreement. The unit will investigate the impact of calls for transparency in corporate and institutional communications by analyzing corpora of disclosure genres collected from transportation companies’ websites (e.g. annual reports, CSR/sustainability reports, integrated reports, codes of ethics, news releases), paying particular attention to the variation between traditional .pdf formats and their more interactive e-paper versions. A corpus will also be built from the websites of European agencies (e.g. European Aviation Safety Agency EASA), including publications (e.g. safety reports, brochures) and other communications through the media or directly to the public (e.g. newsletters, website information). The analysis will explore how transparency emerges in structural, linguistic and multimodal characteristics in
terms of: a) tension between vagueness/ambiguity and precision/clarity; b) types of explanations and forms of “easyfication”. The analysis of best practices could also lead to drafting a set of “maxims” for transparent communication.