How Can We Use Policing the Crisis to Understand Current Hegemonic Struggles

• In Event: Revisiting Policing the Crisis: Race/Immigration, Populism, Culture, and the Media in the Current Conjuncture

Abstract

This presentation argues that the central arguments developed in Policing the Crisis can be transposed to the current European context. A similar hegemonic transformation has been taking place in much larger scale throughout Western Europe, this time through moral panics around Muslim immigrants and Islam. Firstly, it re-conceptualizes moral panics as successive and global series of crises which create an ongoing sense of anxiety and ontologize Muslims vis-à-vis the nation. Secondly, what we see is not a “simple” realignment of class interests in the formation of a new alliance but re-ontologization of the social space. Finally, this re-ontologization happens by projecting the new social imaginary back into history as if society was always imagined in terms of the contemporary ontological categories. In sum, this paper argues that the original analytical and theoretical framework developed in Cultural Studies can still be used to explore the current socio-political contexts.

Author

• Ferruh Yilmaz, Tulane U