Moral Panics, Spectacle, and Everyday Life: Social Anxieties and Minorities

Moral panic refers to the way a social order becomes hyper aware of activities of groups, objects, or circumstances posing a menace to accepted values. Course explores how everyday life is managed, intensified, and altered by moral panics' spectacle. Sexual deviance, drugs, popular culture, disease, witch hunts, gender fears, etc., are not only creations of pre-existing fears, they make various kinds of sense in specific moments. They are how people recognize themselves and new challenges to that self. From those challenges they try to police others; they are public consensus-building events and the means by which we identity our fears and desires.