No. 41 (2022): Moral panics. 50 years after Stanley Cohen

Coordinated by Céline Mavrot, Cédric Passard and Grégoire Lits

Exactly 50 years ago, the sociologist Stanley Cohen developed the concept of moral panics in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. It allowed him to analyse, from an interactionist perspective, how fights between young people in a second-rate English seaside resort around 1964 were considerably amplified by the press and the mass media and eventually led to a strengthening of social control. Since then, this concept has spread widely in different fields of social science (sociology, media studies, political science) but also in the public sphere. As with other concepts at the crossroads of the scientific and political-media fields (populism, conspiracy, etc.), the vagueness surrounding its use and the multiple recuperations of which it is the object raise questions about its nature, its heuristic interest, and the conditions of its scientific use. This issue of Emulations therefore proposes to take a reflective look at this notion, its topicality and its relevance for the social sciences.