Foreword: Moral panics in the contemporary world

Abstract

The papers in this special issue stem from the conference ‘Moral Panics in the Contemporary World’, held at Brunel University in December 2010 – nearly 40 years since the landmark publication of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971) and ‘The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy’ (1971). Over 150 international delegates from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the continuing relevance of the concept of moral panic to analysing a range of contemporary phenomena. The aim of the conference was to explore and evaluate how the concept has developed and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and understanding of current fears, risks, social problems and controversies. Speakers from the plenary sessions included the key progenitors of the moral panic concept, Stan Cohen and Jock Young, and current central figures in moral panic (re)conceptualizing, Chas Critcher and Sean Hier; the academic Catharine Lumby and the journalist James Oliver offered their reflections on being involved and implicated in specific moral panics. This issue includes: papers featuring four of the six speakers from the plenary sessions; a paper authored by Chris Jenks, who gave the opening address at the conference; and two papers from the thematic strands, the first by Julia M. Pearce and Elizabeth Charman, the second by Ragnar Lundstrom. The conference began with an opening address from Brunel University’s Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Sociology, Chris Jenks. In his paper here, ‘The context of an emergent and enduring concept’, Jenks traces the genesis of the concept of moral panic against the backdrop of the social and intellectual upheaval that accompanied its development. He then goes on to explore some of the subsequent developments since its initial formulation, in particular how the possibilities for breaking free of moral constraints have, in contemporary culture, become increasingly individualized and privatized – a process which has accompanied a more general shift in which questions of liminality and transgression have effectively moved to centre stage. Jenks discusses how transgression can be understood as at once a component of, and a counterpoint to, moral panics. He shows how transgressive behaviour is intimately tied up with the continual drawing and redrawing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the