KOM Higher Seminar - Media, money and the inequalities of the market

A text seminar with Dr Axel Vikström, graduate from Örebro University and an adjunct teacher in journalism and media and communication studies at the Department of Communication in Lund.

Abstract

While the rise of economic inequality in recent decades has seen the topic return to the center stage within the social sciences, media and communication-oriented research has been slow to catch on. For this seminar, I will present two pieces of research that approach the mediation of economic inequality, one from “above” and one from “below”. In the first part, I will share the main findings from my PhD thesis about the representation of billionaires in Swedish newspapers, focusing on how the discourses mobilized by the media serve to mitigate tensions between market justice and social justice. In the second part, I will present the first study from my ongoing postdoc project, “Marknadens kommunikatörer”, where historian David Larsson Heidenblad and I have studied how a new set of digital actors – online brokerage firms (OBFs) – sought to popularize stock trading among ordinary Swedes in the late 1990s. By exploring three thematic areas – the democratization of stock trading; the subjectification of the everyman online investor; and education for navigating the online trading landscape – we analyze how the OBFs’ communicative strategies interplayed with established mass media not only to create a mass market for digital finance, but also to normalize the risk-shift from state to individual that has characterized the wider neoliberal market turn. The article is peer-reviewed and has been accepted for publication in History of Intellectual Culture later in 2025.

Axel Vikström has a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Örebro University with a thesis entitled “The Mediated Representation of the Super-Rich: Secrecy, Wealth Taxation and the Tensions of Neoliberal Capitalism”. His research is centered on the mediation of economic practices and the role of discourse and language in naturalizing inequalities in wealth and power. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Marknadens kommunikatörer” affiliated to the Department of History, Lund University, while also teaching undergraduate courses at the Department of Communication.