Explore the vast range of titles available.

Abstract Working beyond latently Durkheimian figurations of moral panic which depict a dialectic between ‘right-thinkers’ and folk devils, this article integrates charismatic entrepreneurs into a tripartite model that sheds light on two new pathways of interaction that are relevant for the sociology of morality. First, charismatic leaders can outflank traditional leaders’ aspersions of folk devils, taking the principle of ‘one-upmanship’ to an extraordinary (and therewith charismatic) extreme. Second, charismatic leaders cancreatively subvert traditional mores, overturning value tables to ‘bedevil’ traditional leaders. Because moral panic and charismatic enthusiasm implicate distinct, complementary, and unitary social processes, I argue that, taken together, the work of Max Weber and Stanley Cohen offer a more theoretically profitable vision of moral denaturation and reformulation than either would alone. Donald Trump’s charismatic ascension during his 2015–16 US Presidential campaign is used to illustrate the theoretical contribution.

We suggest that moral panics exert spillover effects through stigma by mere association. Individuals are harmed even if their ties to stigmatized affiliates are heterophilous, and high-status individuals can also suffer. This creates a broadcast effect that increases the scale of the moral panic. Analyzing the U.S. film industry from 1945 to 1960, we examine how artists' employment in feature films was influenced by their associations with co-workers who were blacklisted as communists after working with the focal artist. Mere association reduces an artist's chances of working again, and one exposure is enough to impair work prospects. Furthermore, actors' careers are impaired when writers with whom they worked are blacklisted. Moreover, the negative effects of stigma by mere association hold even when the focal artist has received public acclaim. These findings have broad implications. When a few individuals or organizations are engaged in wrongdoing and publicly targeted, stigma by association can lead to false positives and harm many innocents.

This article looks at the gender regime of the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) in Turkey through the double lenses of “gender ideology” and moral panics. It traces the itinerary along which “gender ideology” as a reactionary discourse has traveled through a landscape stretching from the Vatican to Turkey. This trajectory places the AKP’s gender perspective and policies within a larger right-wing populist rhetoric of transnational fundamentalism which claims gender is an ideology. The “gender ideology” discourse of the AKP is maintained through a constant sense of crisis which reveals itself in moments of moral panics. The article specifically takes the period of 2019–2020 where such a moment of moral panic was heightened and examines this specific period through an analysis of public speeches of political figures, newspaper articles, and other published materials on the issue. The article shows how this fundamentalist discourse of “gender ideology” and its concomitant strategy of moral panics built an oppressive political environment for women and LGBTI+ people in Turkey and paved the road to the country’s withdrawal from the İstanbul Convention in 2021.

The Bible has inspired Western art and literature for centuries, so it is no surprise that Christian iconography, characters, and stories have also appeared in many comic books. Yet the sheer stylistic range of these comics is stunning. They include books from Christian publishers, as well as underground comix with religious themes and a vast array of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse titles, from Hellboy to Preacher.     Christianity and Comics presents an 80-year history of the various ways that the comics industry has drawn from biblical source material. It explores how some publishers specifically targeted Christian audiences with titles like Catholic Comics, books featuring heroic versions of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, and special religious-themed editions of Archie. But it also considers how popular mainstream comics like Daredevil, The Sandman, Ghost Rider, and Batman are infused with Christian themes and imagery.    Comics scholar Blair Davis pays special attention to how the medium's unique use of panels, word balloons, captions, and serialized storytelling have provided vehicles for telling familiar biblical tales in new ways. Spanning the Golden Age of comics to the present day, this book charts how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans' changing attitudes towards religion.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics offers a comprehensive assemblage of cutting-edge critical and theoretical perspectives on the concept of moral panic. All chapters represent original research by many of the most influential theorists and researchers now working in the area of moral panic, including Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Erich Goode, Joel Best, Chas Critcher, Mary deYoung, Alan Hunt, Toby Miller, Willem Schinkel, Kenneth Thompson, Sheldon Ungar, and Grazyna Zajdow. Chapters come from a range of disciplines, including media studies, literary studies, history, legal studies, and sociology, with significant new elaborations on the concept of moral panic (and its future), informed and powerful critiques, and detailed empirical studies from several continents. A clear and comprehensive survey of a concept that is increasingly influential in a number of disciplines as well as in popular culture, this collection of the latest research in the field addresses themes including the evolution of the moral panic concept, sex panics, media panics, moral panics over children and youth, and the future of the moral panic concept.

   Objective:  to comprehensively analyze the moral panic concept, developed in the works by S. Cohen, and to elaborate, on its basis, a new concept – the dual panic theory.    Methods:  dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical, sociological.    Results:  Moral panics have been broadly discussed in the public discourse since S. Cohen’s (1972) seminal text on the topic. Despite copious research, we believe that the theory is in need of expansion due to the increased complexity of societal interactions. Through the lens of an increasingly polarizing American culture, we believe the original concept of moralpanics is overly simplified and no longer encompasses the intricacies of American society. Using the story of the McCloskey family’s 2020 interactions with Black Lives Matter protestors and Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (1994) definitional criteria, we propose a new, expanded theory of moral panics – Dual Panic Theory.    Scientific novelty:  based on the analysis of the existing approaches to the moral panic concept, the paper offers and elaborates a new concept – the dual panic theory. It suggests that an event can happen that causes a competing panic by two opposing sides of an issue. Different from a culture war, dual panics are genuine panics about an action rather than a reaction to oppositional outrage from a competing interest group. Goode and Ben-Yehuda argue that researching moral panic cannot be complete without an examination of all societal levels, from elites to grassroots, and the full spectrum from ideology and morality at one end to crass status and material interests at the other. As society has evolved, so too must the theoretical explanations of societal reactions, moral panic or otherwise.    Practical significance:  the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to the moral panic concept.

Starting in the late 1970s, a moral panic concerning child kidnapping and exploitation gripped the United States. For many Americans, a series of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children, publicized through an emergent twenty-four-hour news cycle, signaled a “national epidemic” of child abductions perpetrated by strangers. Some observers insisted that fifty thousand or more children fell victim to stranger kidnappings in any given year. (The actual figure was and remains about one hundred.) Stranger Danger demonstrates how racialized and sexualized fears of stranger abduction—stoked by the news media, politicians from across the partisan divide, bereaved parents, and the business sector—helped to underwrite broader transformations in US political culture and political economy. Specifically, the child kidnapping scare further legitimated a bipartisan investment in “family values” and “law and order,” thereby enabling the development and expansion of sex offender registries, AMBER Alerts, and other mechanisms designed to safeguard young Americans and their families from “stranger danger”—and to punish the strangers who supposedly threatened them.

Conspiracies are consequential and social, yet online conspiracy groups that consist of individuals (and bots) seeking to explain events or a system have been neglected in sociology. We extract conspiracy talk about the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter and use the biterm topic model (BTM) to provide a descriptive baseline for the discursive and social structure of online conspiracy groups. We find that individuals enter these communities through a gateway conspiracy theory before proceeding to extreme theories, and humans adopt more diverse conspiracy theories than do bots. Event-history analyses show that individuals tweet new conspiracy theories, and tweet inconsistent theories simultaneously, when they face a threat posed by a rising COVID-19 case rate and receive attention from others via retweets. By contrast, bots are less responsive to rising case rates, but they are more consistent, as they mainly tweet about how COVID-19 was deliberately created by sinister agents. These findings suggest human beings are bricoleurs who use conspiracy theories to make sense of COVID-19, whereas bots are designed to create moral panic. Our findings suggest that conspiracy talk by individuals is defensive in nature, whereas bots engage in offense.

Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem with limited reach among the public. Its prominence in public discourse is instead best understood as a “moral panic.” In this article, we argue that we should shift attention from these evocative but empirically marginal phenomena of deviance connected with digital media toward the structural transformations that give rise to these fears, namely those that have impacted information flows and attention allocation in the public arena. This account centers on structural transformations of the public arena and associated new challenges, especially in relation to gatekeepers, old and new. How the public arena serves actually existing democracy will not be addressed by focusing on disinformation, but rather by addressing structural transformations and the new challenges that arise from these.

In this article the authors undertake a systematic analysis of why border enforcement backfired as a strategy of immigration control in the United States. They argue theoretically that border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow. Using an instrumental variable approach, the authors show how border militarization affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states.