Watch: “Moral Panic in a New Age: Suspicion, Dread and Evolving Conceptions of Youth and the ‘Dangerous classes’ in Urban Space” by Joanne Dillabough

Jo Dillabough, Educational Studies, UBC and the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK: “Moral Panic in a New Age: Suspicion, Dread and Evolving Conceptions of Youth and the ‘Dangerous classes’ in urban space”

Youth Research Symposium

Event details

Abstract

In this presentation I showcase the beginnings of a theoretical approach which attends to the spatial relationships operating between young people, new modes of urban surveillance within and outside schools, and the global problematic associated with moral panic operating in the affluent ‘West’. There has been a recent rise in global media reporting linking youthful urban cultures with incipient terrorist activity (e.g. Levi & Wall, 2004; Lyon, 2004; Mason, 2004). In many ‘Western countries social anxieties about low income urban youth is also visibly on the rise, largely in response to recent political challenges to the idea of the liberal democratic state, and to racial tension and race riots exacerbated by increased urban poverty operating on the suburban fringe of many urban cities (e.g. French youth riots in Aulnay Sur-Bois, Paris). Simultaneously, national security activity and surveillance measures are rapidly expanding and now permeate many areas of social life in the ‘West’ (Lewis, 2006). Arguably, these changes represent a response to pervasive global anxieties about the emergence of post 9/11 terror threats, growing youth terrorist cells and the potential for related actions (e.g. London, 2005). Related educational research has also shown how such broader changes are impacting (both directly and indirectly) upon the nature of increasing surveillance measures directed towards young people in state institutions, particularly in urban schools. The groups most impacted by these trends are economically marginalized youth, often male, and from ethnic and religious minorities in contemporary urban centres, who are increasingly presumed to constitute a ‘homegrown’ problem, comprising – to use the much-quoted words of the former British Prime Minister Thatcher – an ‘enemy within’.

How might we seek to conceptualise this consuming combination of suspicion and dread which is thought to be posed by post-9/11 low-income urban youth? Cohen’s (1972) challenging dualism, ‘folk devils’ and ‘moral panics,’ though now more than three decades old, offers a potentially fruitful avenue for further exploration of this question. Here, the threat of those constructed as youthful ‘folk devils’ provides the symbolic focus for the concentration of a general social perception of uncertainty, loss and anxiety. Cohen’s original notion of panic always retained the material and symbolic charge of its association with the de-stabilizing challenges presented by youth, but the analytical power of moral panic lies in its promise for engaging the radically changed conditions of a new, trans-national economic and cultural world. In the 21st century, however, this concept needs further expansion and theorization if it is to be understand as a crystallized form of both social anxiety and moral regulation in the ‘new global city’. In summary, I seek to outline the relationship between the transnational mobility of moral anxiety as it relates and is responded to, by low-income young people living on the edge of the new global city. In so doing, I hope to illuminate the part played by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of those young people most effected by rising moral panic in urban centres with the hope of further clarifying elements of radical urban change and the regulatory classed properties of morality in new times. Drawing upon preliminary empirical work conducted in Australia, the UK, and Canada, case studies of urban youth and moral anxiety will be presented in order to elaborate and extend theories of youth, moral regulation and social change.