Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Examining the volume and content of media reporting on obesity, we evaluate whether the “obesity epidemic” can be constructively analyzed as a “moral panic,” in which the obese are treated as “folk devils” who violate societal values of self-control (Cohen 1972). Drawing on content analysis of 212 media articles, we find that media coverage of obesity does indeed have many of the characteristics of a moral panic. Public attention to this issue has ballooned in a way that is disproportionate to increased rates of obesity and treatment of related problems like smoking, hunger/malnutrition, and eating disorders. The media has dramatized and stylized the issue by reporting most heavily on scientific studies with dramatic findings, employing alarming metaphors, citing laundry lists of health risks associated with obesity, and sidestepping scientific debates about whether obesity is as much of a problem as some maintain. The media has treated obesity as a moral issue by focusing on individual more than structural obesity causes and solutions, especially when discussing African-Americans, Latinos, or the poor, suggesting that the issue of obesity has the potential to deepen inequality based on race, ethnicity, and class, as it simultaneously reinforces prejudice based on body size. We identify several factors that are associated with increased reporting on obesity, including increased consumption, increased publication of medical research on obesity, marketing of weight-loss drugs, and the number of weight-loss surgeries performed, lending some evidence for grassroots, elite-engineered, and interest-groups theories of moral panics.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper traces the strategies and ambitions of the unlikely coalition of feminist activists, conservative Christians, and bipartisan state actors who, over the last decade, have successfully encoded their concerns about sexual slavery and forced migration into broad-ranging discourses and policies. I seek to explain how contemporary campaigns against human trafficking have mobilized constituencies with opposing backgrounds, interests, and political agendas, and on what terms the alliance between these disparate groups has been forged. What do feminists groups have to offer conservative Christians, and vice versa? Why and how has the issue of human trafficking been taken up by the state? How have disparate groups mobilized the languages of rights and victimization to secure broader interest for their claims? My inquiry will center around four significant moments in policy transformation: the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the crafting of the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, both in the year 2000; the passage of the U.S. Global AIDS Act in 2003; and the contemporary campaign to “target demand” nationally and internationally through the criminalization of prostitutes’ customers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Utilizing feminist standpoint theory this study explores how one group of women experienced the chronic threat of job loss. An interpretive case study method along with a thematic content analysis was utilized to explore the research question "how do one group of women experience the chronic threat of job loss?" Twelve women who worked for the same organization for over twenty-five years were interviewed about their experiences with the chronic threat of job loss. The women in this group were under constant threat of office closings and layoffs due to mergers, contract negotiations and strikes. Consequences the women suffered were emotional strain, isolation, fear and anger along with the chronic threat that material goods (a company pension) would be lost. The unique aspect of this study is that both the threat of job loss and its consequences were chronic in nature and the consequences are prevalent in the discursive practices shared by the women in this study.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Japan's economic power started making itself felt in the 1960s and was brought to public attention by books like Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One (1979). But, it was in the early to mid 1980s--the period immediately preceding the string of purchases listed above--that Japan became a truly significant element in the American political and cultural landscape. As Japan moved from economic strength to strength, certain American discourse on Japan developed a peculiar mixture of panic and peevishness that suggested the latter's preeminence was causing more than purely economic concern. In this paper, I will examine how Japan comes to be constructed in this period (roughly from 1983 to 1990) as that which America both must and must not be, as America's past and future. I argue that this complex of desire and denigration produced an examination and re-articulation of American national identity that questioned some very basic assumptions about that identity. I am looking at two different sites where this discourses were circulated. The first site consists of popular discussions of economic and foreign policy relations between the United States and Japan in magazines like Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Business Week, and in contemporary books written about this issue that received widespread attention in the mainstream press. The second site consists of two mainstream Hollywood films that narrativized these tensions, Gung Ho (1986) and Black Rain (1989).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: During the late summer and early fall of 1831, newspaper accounts in the weeks succeeding Nat Turner's slave revolt and massacre of white families in Southampton County indicated an increasing state of alarm in Southern states as reports of new slave uprisings and conspiracies increasingly appeared. The research examines Northern and Southern newspaper coverage of the hysteria gripping other slave holding states in the aftermath of Nat Turner's Revolt. It addresses how those reports reflected, what media scholar Roger Fowler calls, “a hysterical style of the press” and contributed to a "moral panic."