Angela McRobbie
Angela McRobbie is a cultural theorist and Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. With Sarah Thornton she published a 1995 paper in the British Journal of Sociology arguing that Stanley Cohen's moral panic model assumes a media world that no longer exists.
Who they are
McRobbie was born in 1951. She studied in Scotland and did postgraduate work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, then held posts at the Polytechnic of East London, St Martins School of Art and Thames Valley University from 1981. She was a reader at Loughborough University in 1996 and became Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths in 1998. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018. These details come from a secondary encyclopaedia entry, which is internally inconsistent on the dates of two of her later books.
Her work covers youth culture and subcultures, the creative industries and cultural labour, particularly in fashion, and feminist theory. Her books include Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses (1988), Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen (1991), Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994), In the Culture Society (1999), The Aftermath of Feminism and Be Creative.
Key papers
McRobbie, A., & Thornton, S. L. (1995). Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds. British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), 559-574. doi:10.2307/591571. The Goldsmiths repository lists it as "Re-Conceptualising Moral Panic in Multi-mediated Social Worlds" and holds no abstract or full text.
Key ideas
As summaries of the paper have it, Cohen's model assumes a small number of media outlets, a broad public consensus and folk devils with no voice. In a fragmented media environment the folk devils answer back, often in the same outlets, and some subcultures court the panic because it benefits them.
The objection does not retire the concept. This site treats moral panic as a lens with a known bias: useful for describing how a society handled an alarm, and in need of the same evidence as any claim it answers. McRobbie and Thornton's point matters most for technology, where the supposed victims and the supposed devil, the platforms, both have loud channels of their own.
The vault knows the paper through the journal record and summaries only. The full text was not read.
Sources
- Biographical details: encyclopaedia entry for Angela McRobbie, read 24 October 2026; secondary.
- McRobbie and Thornton (1995): journal citation and DOI confirmed from Crossref and the Goldsmiths repository record; no abstract or full text available there.