Sarah Thornton

Who they are

The Goldsmiths repository record for the 1995 paper names the co-author as Sarah L. Thornton. A sociologist of the same name wrote Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (1995), edited The Subcultures Reader with Ken Gelder (1997), and later wrote about the art world in Seven Days in the Art World (2008) and 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014) and about breasts in Tits Up (2024). She has a BA in the history of art from Concordia University in Montreal and a PhD in the sociology of culture from the University of Strathclyde. She has been a lecturer at the University of Sussex, a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, a brand planner at a London advertising agency and chief writer on contemporary art at The Economist. These details come from a secondary encyclopaedia entry, which also lists the 1995 paper in her bibliography.

The subject matter of those books, subcultures, clubs and the media that describe them, fits a paper about folk devils who talk back. The encyclopaedia entry's bibliography lists the McRobbie paper under her name, which settles the identification.

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.

Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital.

Key ideas

The paper's argument, as summaries give it, is that moral panic theory was built for a media system with few outlets, in which the supposed folk devils had no platform. Where media are fragmented, the groups under attack respond in public, and some court the attention.

For this site the practical lesson is about use. Calling an alarm a moral panic is a claim about how a society handled it, not a ruling on whether there was harm. It needs evidence of its own, in particular a measure of the harm against which the reaction can be judged out of scale.

Only the journal record and summaries were read. The paper's full text was not reached.

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