At its broadest, this dissertation asks how ethical trade is communicated in Poland and Finland. Ethical trade encases a wide set of initiatives concerned with terms of exchange and conditions of production, but also with other issues surrounding global trade, such as tax justice and environmental sustainability. To clip these diverse projects together, ethical trade is theorised here as a communication problem in that its success hinges on constructing among consumers a moral disposition that recognises distant producers and their predicament as being worthy of attention, emotion and action. This disposition is construed through mediation, that is, an ethically charged process of communication in which social reality is constructed, negotiated and circulated.

This study distinguishes between two modes of mediation. The first mode, mediated familiarity, establishes a representation-anchored cognitive connection between consumers and producers on the basis of factual knowledge and a degree of affinity. The second mode, moral education, is geared towards constructing consumers who independently consider the impact of their everyday consumption choices on faraway producers and workers. Theorised in this way, moral education is then operationalised through three analytical concepts:(1) solidarity, understood as a morality of cooperation;(2) care, approached as a dialectic between care for oneself and close ones, and care for Southern producers as distant strangers; and (3) responsibility, conceptualised as a collective moral and political obligation to alter the unjust structures of global trade.