The October 2008 Cultural Studies Review is a special issue focusing on cultures of panic, particularly recent examples of moral panic arising from issues of race, gender and sexuality. The diverse essays deal with "men of Middle Eastern appearance", the trial of Private Kovko, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the use of Ritalin, concerns around children and sexuality in Australia, and arts funding in the United States during the culture wars.
The moral panic has centrally to do with the behaviour of crowds, particularly the virtual crowds created by the mass media. It's a mechanism of expulsion, and thus at the same time of group solidarity. It's also a particularly powerful genre of the tabloid media: in its identification and shaming of deviant social groups it rigidly defines and reinforces moral norms, and is complicit with political strategies of consolidation and othering which create and depend on a sense of horror at refugees who wilfully throw their children overboard or push in to the front of the "queue", at paedophiles grooming children over the internet, at drug-crazed criminals and bingeing teenagers...
The challenge is to move beyond the realisation that moral panics are not rationally constructed to an analysis of the passional bases of the social order, and to an understanding of how our politics might deal with this without itself falling into the contagion of panic. The diverse collection of essays gathered together in this edition takes up that challenge.
