Folk Devils and the Hipster Figure: On Classification Struggles, Social Types and Figures in Moral Panic Research

Over the last four decades, moral panic research has undergone much fruitful critical interrogation and theoretical development, recently in dialogue with research on moral regulation (Critcher 2009; Hier 2011; Hunt 2011), (de)civilizing processes (Rohloff 2018) and risk (Ungar 2001). In these debates, the moral panic concept has been revised and critiqued from a number of angles. Yet, during this time, its twin concept, the folk devil, has been rather undertheorized and rarely subjected to reflexive analysis (Introduction and Afterword in this volume; Walsh 2019). Indeed, Stanley Cohen admits that Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the book in which he first