ECREA16-Abstract

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Thursday, November 10

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PP 174

Policing the Crisis in the New Millennium: New Right-Wing Hegemony

F. Yilmaz

Tulane University, Communication, New Orleans, USA

Despite the enormous success of the populist right across Europe, and the obvious shift of allegiance of “working class” from social democratic parties to

the right, very few communication scholars have invested their research in studying communication strategies of the populist forces or the provocation and/

or managements of moral panics by the populist right. The responses to the Paris attacks in November 2015 once again demonstrate the relevance of Hall

et al.’s groundbreaking work Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (PC) for understanding how this kind of political crises are instru‑

mental to hegemonic interventions. PC is an innovative exploration of the connection between the moral panic around racialized crime and the hegemonic

crisis in Britain which led to the emergence of the British New Right. The moral panic around “mugging” rendered “black mugger” the condensed symbol

of everything that was going wrong with Britain.The“mugger”was the enemy within; he signified the arrival of alien cultures values and the disintegration

of the mythical, harmonious English past. PC was in this sense an analysis of how the mobilization of a right-wing response to the moral panic around crime

and race led to the formation of the new neo-liberal hegemony. The central arguments developed in Policing the Crisis can easily be transposed to the cur‑

rent European context. A similar hegemonic transformation has been taking place in much larger scale throughout Western Europe the last three decades,

but this time through moral panics around Muslim immigrants and Islam. This paper elaborates upon PC’s insights to account for the populist right-wing

hegemony in contemporary Europe. Firstly, PC focused on a single moral panic around the“black mugger”that started a chain of events eventually creating

a crisis of representation and breaking down the social democratic consensus. Today’s Muslim immigrant functions in the same manner as yesterday’s

“black mugger.”The responses to the Paris attacks are the case in point. The public outrage, the calls for unity and the restrictive institutional responses to

the murders are typical indicators of a moral panic that once again position Muslims as the“folk devils”of our times who threaten social order and harmony

of European/Western societies. The difference is that the deviant figure of the Muslim is not created on the basis of a single moral panic but through a suc‑

cessive series of moral panics and crises around Muslim practices (terrorism, forced marriage, female circumcision, freedom of speech, violence, criminality

and gang rapes, etc.).This paper, thus, re-conceptualizes moral panics as successive and global series of crises (of different scales and intensity) which create

an ongoing sense of anxiety and ontologize Muslims vis-à-vis the nation. This paper argues that what we see is not a“simple”realignment of class interests

in the formation of a new alliance (i.e. historical bloc). The hegemonic interventions do not necessarily aim at the aligning existing social classes but at

transforming the very socio-political landscape that also re-ontologizes social stratification.

PP 175

Dignity Despite Vulnerability? Current Ethical Principles of the Media Discourse on Advance Directives

M. Menke

, S. Kinnebrock

Augsburg University, Department for Media- Knowledge and Communication imwk, Augsburg, Germany

Death is no longer a private matter. More and more people spend their last days in hospitals and hospices being confronted with a wide range of possible

life-prolonging treatments. Clinicians are bound to the oath of Hippocrates which implies prolonging the patient’s live as long as possible. Patients, however,

might have had other believes about a dignified living and dying, but are no longer able to articulate them. In this dilemma, advance directives can be

an instrument that ensures that the individual will of a patient can be respected also in final live phases. Advance directives consequently serve the main‑

tenance of human autonomy. German mass media have embraced the Advance Directive Act which was passed in 2009 as well as the spread of advance

directives. We argue that this is not surprising against the background of a) dominant conceptions of man within Western societies and b) certain media

logics. a) Dominant conceptions of dignity: In Western countries, an autonomy-based approach to human dignity dominates. It goes back to the concept

of man introduced during the Enlightenment, especially in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant who connected dignity with man’s ability of reason and

self-determination (Kant, 1784).The reverse reading, however, might lead to the loss of dignity if a person´s mental and physical abilities decline due to age

or sickness.This dilemma was recognized and criticized in more recent care ethical approaches by scholars such as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Elisabeth Conra‑

di (2001). They advocate to base dignity on the idea of social connectedness. Vulnerability is seen as a part of human life and care understood as a human as

well as societal responsibility, which gives dignity to both, care givers and care receivers. As a result, care and support can compensate the loss of autonomy

in times of vulnerability. Care ethics refer to an increasing demand of practical care work in social reality. b) Media logics: With respect to media logics we

know that the media – popular fiction as well as press coverage – embraces autonomously acting characters. Narratives need a protagonist (Abbott 2010),

a characteristic of press coverage is personalization (Adam & Maier 2010). According to these media logics it could be presumed that autonomy-based

conceptions of dignity dominate in the media. On the other hand, apparent demographic developments such as the growing number of old and vulnerable

persons who are dependent on care should also be represented in press coverage, which might lead to more references to care-ethical principles. By pre‑

senting a quantitative content analysis of leading print media we show in what way these two ethical conceptions of dignity can be traced in the debates.

As an example, we have chosen the public debate on advance directives in Germany from 2007 until 2015. We will illustrate how dignity is constructed in

the portrayals of vulnerable people and their relationships to others, such as doctors, nurses and relatives.