Abstrakt
How does the language of blame work in times of neo-liberalism and economic crisis? Is moral panic still a useful concept, despite all the criticism that has formed against it? How does moral panic affect its objects? The study 'Anti-Polish Migrant Moral Panic in the UK' brings into focus some very valuable contributions to answering these questions. It also gives rise to two other questions: Can the various representations of 'folk devils' that surface in times of crisis be compared? What relationship can be identified between moral panic, cultural hegemony and political action? Below I shall attempt to address these questions.
I shall first reconstruct the conceptual and methodological basis of Fitzgerald and Smoczynski's study and then outline possible areas of comparison with my own research on the moral panic whipped up about Czech Roma during times of crisis. To close I shall revisit the concept of hegemony, which seems to have disappeared from moral panic research today, and propose a way of making this concept analytically fruitful again.