Moral Panic (moral + panic)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 1 2009
ROB C. MAWBY
Abstract: In the latest phase of European Union enlargement Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to EU membership on 1 January 2007. In the UK, media coverage of the accession process focused on the potential movement of large numbers of people from Eastern to Western European states; a particular focus was the crime risk associated with enlargement. This article examines how newspapers reported the perceived crime threats and assesses the extent to which the concerns can be understood as a moral panic. The article confirms the contemporary utility of moral panic analysis, albeit with some flexibility to reflect the modern media landscape. [source]


Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality by Fred Fejes

THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE, Issue 4 2009
Peter Cava
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Schoolyard Shootings: Racism, Sexism, and Moral Panics over Teen Violence

ANTIPODE, Issue 4 2001
Stuart C Aitken
First page of article [source]


Unmarried in Palestine: Embodiment and (dis)Empowerment in the Lives of Single Palestinian Women

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2010
Penny Johnson
There are rising numbers of single women across the Arab world. While this is usually connected with delayed marriage, Palestine shows a unique pattern of early but not universal marriage. This article looks beneath the statistics to investigate the stories behind this trend. How do young unmarried women negotiate boundaries and understand and enact choice in the context of a society experiencing prolonged insecure and warlike conditions, political crisis and social fragmentation and where the high number of unmarried women can be an increasing locus of moral panic? In conducting focus groups with two generations of women, my research looks at the prevailing importance of education, civil society and security in negotiating space within women's lives and uncovers a long tradition of unmarried women leading full and significant lives which needs to be recovered from the past. [source]


Children at Risk: Legal and Societal Perceptions of the Potential Threat that the Possession of Child Pornography Poses to Society

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2002
Suzanne Ost
This article examines legal and social discourses surrounding the phenomenon of child pornography, considering the legal responses to child pornography (particularly when an individual is found to be in possession of such material), and the way in which such material, the child, and the possessor of child pornography are socially constructed. The article raises the question of whether there has been a moral panic regarding child pornography and the possession of such material, but also considers whether there are real reasons to consider that the possession of child pornography should remain illegal. Research studies which aim to establish the existence of a causal link between possessing child pornography and the act of committing child sexual abuse are examined, as is the argument that criminalizing the possession of child pornography reduces the market for such material. Finally, there is an analysis of the possible impact of social constructions of the child as innocent. [source]


The Politics of Antiracism & Social Justice: The Perspective of a Human Rights Network in the U.S. South

NORTH AMERICAN DIALOGUE (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
Faye V. Harrison
Abstract: Since 9/11 the sociopolitical and legal climate of the country has deteriorated, engendering a moral panic over national security and intensifying a longstanding trend of violating the human rights of a portion of the citizenry and immigrant population. These segments of the populace lived under de facto conditions of a police state long before the War on Terror and the USA Patriot Act. This repression implicates the War on Drugs and a racially- and class-biased system of criminal (in)justice with which Homeland Security intersects. Problems such as these have attracted the attention of both social scientists and activists mobilizing for social justice. Among the latter is a southeastern network of human rights organizers who map their region as part of the Global South. A multiracial group organized around the vision of three African American women, the Southern Human Rights Organizers Network promotes consciousness and praxis shaped by the vernacularization of international human rights discourse and the reclamation of the history of African American and broader Afro-Atlantic struggles for expanding the terms of what it means to be human. [source]


Risk and panic in late modernity: implications of the converging sites of social anxiety

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2003
Sean P. Hier
ABSTRACT Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues related to processes of social control, claims making and general perceptions of public safety. This paper charts an alternative trajectory, asserting that analytic priority rests not with an understanding of the implications of changing but converging sites of social anxiety. Concentrating on the converging sites of social anxiety in late modernity, the analysis forecasts a proliferation of moral panics as an exaggerated symptom of the heightened sense of uncertainty purported to accompany the ascendency of the risk society. [source]


Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 1 2009
ROB C. MAWBY
Abstract: In the latest phase of European Union enlargement Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to EU membership on 1 January 2007. In the UK, media coverage of the accession process focused on the potential movement of large numbers of people from Eastern to Western European states; a particular focus was the crime risk associated with enlargement. This article examines how newspapers reported the perceived crime threats and assesses the extent to which the concerns can be understood as a moral panic. The article confirms the contemporary utility of moral panic analysis, albeit with some flexibility to reflect the modern media landscape. [source]


Regulation of space in the contemporary postcolonial Pacific city: Port Moresby and Suva

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 3 2003
John Connell
Abstract:,National development problems in the weak states of Papua New Guinea and Fiji have resulted in external intervention. However neo-liberal development strategies have not resolved development problems and may have further weakened state structures. In both capital cities rural-urban migration, rising urban unemployment, and the expansion of squatter settlements and the informal sector have all continued in recent years. The numbers of beggars, street kids and prostitutes have increased, as has domestic violence and crime. Governments have opposed all these trends, by regulation and intolerance, violence, routine repression and eviction, rather than by pro-poor policies. Settlers, prostitutes, beggars, street kids and market vendors have been evicted and moved on, on the ideological premise that that their true place is in rural areas, and that their urban presence challenges and threatens notions of urban order. Moral regulation, social exclusion and moral panic have divided ,good citizens' from marginal and possibly criminal others, intensifying social divisions within the cities. Sustainable urban development has proved difficult to achieve. [source]


Is Research-Ethics Review a Moral Panic?,

CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 1 2001
Will C. van den HoonaardArticle first published online: 14 JUL 200
Au cours des dix dernières années, nous avons été témoins de l'im-portance croissante accordée aux principes d'éthique appliqués à la recherche mais aussi de la popularité et de la pertinence grandis-santes de la recherche inductive, plus connue sous le nom de recherche et d'analyse qualitatives. Dans cet article, nous étudions le contexte social dans lequel se situe l'examen déontologique des travaux de recherche et son influence sur la recherche qualitative. Plus précisément, nous soutenons que, lorsque cet examen déontologique est fondé sur les principes et l'épistémologie de la recherche déductive, il a tendance à rogner et à entraver le dynamisme et l'ob-jet de la recherche qualitative. À l'aide de documents, de rapports de recherche formelle et d'après notre expérience personnelle et celle d'autres collègues, nous démontrons l'aspect disproportioné de l'examen déontologique de la recherche, qui semble favoriser la recherche quantitative - c'est-à-dire la recherche formelle fondée sur des hypothèses -, au détriment de la recherche qualitative. Nos exem-ples proviennent surtout du Canada, des États-Unis et d'Angleterre, en anthropologie, éducation, sciences infirmières, psychologie et so-ciologie. Nous affirmons que les processus sociaux qui sous-tendent l'analyse déontologique de la recherche s'apparentent à ceux que lon associe à une panique morale. The recent decade saw not only the rise of the importance of formal ethical research guidelines, but also witnessed the growing popularity and relevance of inductive research, better known as qualitative research and analysis. This paper addresses the social context of formal ethical review and its influence on qualitative research. Specifically, it suggests that when ethical review is based on the principles and epistemology of deductive research, it tends to erode or hamper the thrust and purpose of qualitative research. Using documents, formal research accounts, and the experiences of others and myself, the author indicates the lopsided nature of reviewing the ethics of research, which seems to work in favour of quantitative, formal hypotheses-driven research, to the serious disadvantage of qualitative research. The paper draws most heavily on evidence in Canada, the United States, and England, in the fields of anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, and sociology. The social processes underpinning research-ethics review, the author avers, are similar to those associated with a moral panic. [source]


The ,digital natives' debate: A critical review of the evidence

BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, Issue 5 2008
Sue Bennett
The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed ,digital natives' or the ,Net generation', these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. Grand claims are being made about the nature of this generational change and about the urgent necessity for educational reform in response. A sense of impending crisis pervades this debate. However, the actual situation is far from clear. In this paper, the authors draw on the fields of education and sociology to analyse the digital natives debate. The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a ,moral panic'. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate ,digital natives' and their implications for education. [source]


Risk and panic in late modernity: implications of the converging sites of social anxiety

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2003
Sean P. Hier
ABSTRACT Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues related to processes of social control, claims making and general perceptions of public safety. This paper charts an alternative trajectory, asserting that analytic priority rests not with an understanding of the implications of changing but converging sites of social anxiety. Concentrating on the converging sites of social anxiety in late modernity, the analysis forecasts a proliferation of moral panics as an exaggerated symptom of the heightened sense of uncertainty purported to accompany the ascendency of the risk society. [source]


Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2005
Jack Z. Bratich
This article examines early problematizations of "the audience" in communication studies (in Michel Foucault's sense of problematization). Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's concept of the "multitude," the author argues that the audience is a product of discursive constructions, but that these constructions themselves draw upon the ontological practices of what may be called "audience powers" or "mediated multitudes." Problematizations of the audience in communication studies are examples of what Negri calls "constituted power," as they seek to capture conceptually the immanent practices of audience constituent powers. Concentrating on 3 early audience discourses (propaganda, marketing, and moral panics), the author assesses how audience power provoked these problematizations and argues that an ontology of media subjects and audience powers offers new perspectives on audiences and audience studies. [source]