Research Dialogues
Francesco Marengo - University of Turin, will hold a seminar Wednesday, March 26 2025 h. 14, entitled "Environmental accounting without nature – A critical philosophical visual analysis".
This paper examines how visuals in sustainability reports strategically project legitimacy to maintain power, simultaneously misrepresenting nature and human impacts. Grounded in Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature (2009), our analysis identifies three categories of nature representation—eco mimesis, ambient poetics, and romantic sublime—and explores how their narratives influence perceptions of human-environment relationships. Focusing on sustainability reports of Dow Jones Sustainability Index companies, we uncover implicit ideologies reinforcing anthropocentrism and obscuring ecological interdependence. By deconstructing conventional portrayals of nature, our study advocates for critical environmental communication aligning corporate practices with genuine sustainability challenges, providing a framework to recognize these underlying narratives.
For other information: diseade@unimib.it