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This thesis examines a moment in recent U.S. immigration history where an opportunity was created to move towards merit-based immigration, but that proposal was rejected. In addition to the highly publicized proposal for the legalization of undocumented immigrants residing in the United States, the 2007 Immigration Reform Bill proposed a merit-based immigrant selection policy, or “Point System.” The new system would have evaluated potential immigrants according to characteristics deemed to be in the U.S. “national interest.” Critical discourse analysis of policy documents, media coverage in The New York Times and San Diego Union Tribune, and political rhetoric on the floor of the U.S. Senate reveals a distinct moral geography to selection policy. Whereas in Canada, economic immigration is the popularly endorsed mode of immigrant selection, the U.S. “Point System” proposal launched a diatribe by politicians and pundits, who called merit-based immigration “an experiment in social engineering” (Barack Obama 2007), against a “natural” human and “moral imperative” to reunite families (Robert Menendez 2007). This thesis demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between race and class, and how its complexity, when considered against the backdrop of immigration policy reform, becomes bound up in state endeavours to form and perpetuate national identity through discourses of citizenship. The U.S. economy’s need for transient labour conflicts with the state’s nation-building project: one that excludes Hispanic migrants. The moral crisis over the dismantling of family reunification in the U.S. serves as a competing discourse to the existing anxiety about Latino immigration and undocumented migrants, and as discussion, albeit veiled, of whether or not it is morally right to construct an immigration policy that disadvantages certain groups, most notably Latinos. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2008-06-30 12:35:39.393

This thesis examines news articles to see if obesity has been framed as a moral panic by looking at how the coverage understands the causes of obesity and its solutions. A qualitative textual analysis of 100 articles and 28 images from Time and Newsweek was done spanning 1986 to 2012. I found that the obesity "epidemic" was first discussed as problem of individual responsibility and that the best cure was medicine. The narrative shifted to childhood obesity around 2004 and cited parents as the responsible party while suggesting family bonding as a solution to childhood obesity. I find that the media dialogue around obesity points to individuals rather than systemic factors as the cause of obesity and, in so doing, takes the focus off of social and economic inequalities that are also factors in the obesity epidemic.

abstract: Public mass shootings occur at a rate in the U.S. that is higher than any other developed country. These event initiate wide spread media attention. The media attention these events achieve have shown to impact the public behavior (e.g., increased firearm sales). However, the impact public mass shootings have on firearm storage and carry habits of the public is not well understood. Using data collected from the Transportation Security Administration, this study examines how mass shootings have led to moral panics occurring within the U.S. through the examination of the firearm carrying habits among the population immediately following mass shootings. The results indicate that loaded firearms with rounds in the chamber detected by the TSA have significantly increased since 2012. Further, firearms detected immediately following a public mass shooting had a higher proportion of firearms loaded with a round in the chamber relative to 7 days prior to the shooting. Moreover, the increase in proportions of firearms found loaded with a round in the chamber exponentially decays as days past the initial shooting, these events occur at a higher rate than the decay rate can normalize these occurrences. I conclude that in the wake of these shootings a moral panic ensues that is partially responsible for the change in the general public’s arming configuration habits. Further research is needed in to determine the impact on crime, and public health related issues due to this change in the public’s firearm carrying habits. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Criminology and Criminal Justice 2018

In this paper, I expand on poststructuralist and feminist theories of the body, gender, and subjectivity through an analysis of media discourse on childhood obesity. Through textual and narrative analyses of news segments on childhood obesity, I demonstrate that the obese child's body, as an abnormal body, is represented as a text of the 'abnormal' conditions in which that body is produced. Thus, the single-mother family structure and/or nonwhite and working class families -- families saturated with the excessive, out-of-control subjectivity of the Other-- are visible on the excessive, out-ofcontrol body of the obese child. I will argue that the discourse surrounding childhood obesity is indicative of a moral panic, where children's bodies are used to express a fear of the destabilization of the normative family structure and a fear of an irrational, excessive, over-consuming society saturated with the subjectivity of the Other.

In the four decades since Stanley Cohen (1972) first theorised the ‘moral panic’, there has been immense technological change in the field of communications and media. Whilst Cohen’s original model relies on elite-driven mediated narratives, I argue that moral panics have taken on a memetic quality in the convergent and participatory mediascape. In other words: in an age of social media, moral panic discourses are increasingly open to contestation, reinterpretation, and recirculation by multiple actors and groups. In this thesis, I examine one such group – the web’s largest white nationalist (WN) forum, Stormfront. To do so, I trace three racialized media events as they circulate on and through the Forum. Here, I show how the mechanics of the moral panic have fundamentally shifted in the digital age. I explore the means by which Stormfront users exploit this semi-democratised mediascape in an attempt to ‘manage’ and exploit moral panics surrounding episodes of racialized violence. To this end, I explore the topologically entangled shuttling back and forth of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives and spaces to argue for a more-than-digital geography of computer mediated communication. Here, I show how the Forum’s ‘collective voice’ is often given expression through selective quotation by mainstream media surrounding racialized moral panics. This process of remediation, I argue, allows explicitly racist groups fugitive access to mainstream discourse, and turns mainstream media outlets into unwitting nodes in a white nationalist broadcast network. However, I argue that this public-facing process, opens WNs up to increased scrutiny, leading to strategic and contingent deployments of contradictory repertoires of race. In doing so, I examine repertoires of race in such WN interventions - highlighting their flexible and contingent construction of racialized categories in the negotiation of contemporary structures of feeling (Williams 1977; Anderson 2014). I contend that a digitally-inflected antiracism must attend to the contingent, translocal, and assembled nature of racism online if it is to be effective.

This study is a discourse analysis of media representations of young people’s participation in the summer riots that spread across the UK in August 2011. Drawing on articles published in three UK newspapers The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Sun this paper critically assesses the ways in which the media identified the behaviour of young people as symptomatic of a general moral decline in British society. Along with the media portrayal of children and young people during these events, the study also highlights the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a further way of questioning the reporting practices of mainstream media. Articles 2, 12 and 13 will have specific focus in the study, in order to evaluate the media’s recurrent misrepresentation of young people’s participation in decision making on matters concerning their own wellbeing.

This thesis explores the depiction of doping in the press. My interest in the topic stemmed from an early personal experience in competitive athletics where I was exposed to an in-sports reality that tolerated the use of performance-enhancing substances. However, references to doping in the media appeared to depict it in a different way. In order to investigate the divergence, the thesis analysed the reporting of two Olympic Games, namely Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008. It focused on empirical data and thus all articles that referenced doping were collected one month prior, during and one month after the two Olympic Games. In total 1274 articles were collected and analysed. Adopting a post-structuralist approach, the discourse analysis of the data leads to the identification of journalistic techniques that constructed discursive statements of doping. It was observed that first of all, in the case of highly publicised drug cases, these statements could be understood as constructing a moral panic episode. Secondly, the same discursive statements were circulated in the press even in the absence of positive doping samples. The thesis draws on the theories of moral regulation and governmentality to make sense of the constant presence of doping discursive statements in the press. It argues that inducting doping into sport spectacle makes its depiction seem apolitical and disconnected from society. However, in-depth theorisation of the phenomenon shows that its mediated construction plays an active role in influencing public policy.

In June 2010 an urban fox (Vulpes vulpes) attacked twin baby girls in their bedroom in Hackney, East London. The story made national newspaper headlines for weeks to follow and elicited commentary from concerned city-dwellers, pest controllers, foxhunters, politicians, scientists and animal protectionists. Many considered urban foxes a growing menace, branding them overabundant, out of place and more aggressive than their rural counterparts. Hunters pointed to the ban on hunting with dogs as a possible cause of a supposed explosion in the urban fox population and as a manifestation of urban ignorance regarding wildlife management. Others defended the foxes' place in the city and warned against knee-jerk reactions to one-off incidents. However, the response from many public and political figures to media reports of fox attacks was to call for urgent action on what is ostensibly a problem of animal behaviour. This thesis examines the urban fox attack phenomenon as a form of moral panic. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of a large sample of tabloid and broadsheet national newspaper articles, as well as a selection of television documentaries, pest control industry publications and lobby group materials spanning five years (2009–2014), is used to track the emergence and development of this moral panic and to examine how it is tied to anxieties surrounding not only human/animal relations in urban space, but also human social conflict more widely. In so doing, the thesis contributes a new perspective to the study of moral panics by reflecting on the implications for moral panic theory of ‘bringing animals in’.

This study analyzes the reporting and editorializing in several major American newspapers during the height of the Citizen Genêt Affair in July and August, 1793. A hybrid form of sociological moral panic theory, focused predominantly on the "iteration" of moral panics and the language used to communicate them, is used to understand the dynamics of the information landscape of 1793. Specific attention is paid to the effects of time and space, personal and political bias, and incendiary historical rhetoric on reporting of and reactions to Genêt's actions. In doing so, this study highlights possible flaws or blind spots in both moral panic theory and historiography, and brings new understanding to the media environment in which America's political traditions gestated. Brief connections are drawn between this historical information landscape and series of events and contemporary concerns with regards to social media and incendiary political rhetoric. / Master of Arts