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Legal Studies 310: Moral Panics
Class Background
How and why do some issues, real or imagined, get blown out of proportion? In Legal Studies 310: Moral Panics, students explore what moral panics are, how they occur, and how we respond to them via legislation and policing within the context of the United States. Students think intersectionally, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape who or what is seen as “dangerous” or ‘deviant.” Along the way, they develop a robust theoretical toolkit, combining an interdisciplinary range of perspectives from critical criminology, sociolegal scholarship, cultural studies, and creative non-fiction journalism to help them recognize and critique dubious claims.
Legal Studies 310 is an upper-level elective with no prerequisites, open to all majors, and capped at around 30 students.
The Context of the Project
The Problem
The Legal Studies major requires a senior thesis in which students develop their own research project. In previously teaching the thesis seminar, one common problem I saw was that students often engaged with a surface-level analysis of primary artifacts, often focusing on the direct words on the page, and taking the words at face value. Using my Moral Panics class as a training ground for the thesis seminar, I wanted to provide students with the opportunity to critically analyze primary artifacts beyond a surface level reading, thinking about what assumptions and anxieties were present in the artifacts as well as what was presented as evidence and who was seen as an "expert." In addition, I wanted them to think beyond a single artifact by seeing how different types of material "talk" to each other to present a narrative about an issue or topic.
The Goal of the Project
Switch from weekly writing assignments and a final paper to the building of weekly digital collections and a final digital exhibit.
Pedagogical Questions
How can the use of digital exhibits:
Advance students’ understanding about the creation and policing of moral panics in the United States?
Build skills in media literacy and critical analysis of primary sources?
Tools Utilized
Tools Utilized
Omeka is a free content management system for building digital collections and exhibits. It allows for a curated mixture of primary sources and interpretive text that helps “tell a story” about a particular topic.
While not integrated with Canvas, it is easy to invite students to the platform, has a fairly low learning curve, and is intuitive to use.
The platform also offers extensive online support, how-to guides, and videos, which are helpful for teaching students how to use it.
The Assessments
Weekly Collections:
Each week, students upload a specific primary artifact type to our class Omeka site and write a 500-word response analyzing their item and connecting it to course materials from the week.
For example, on the right, during our unit on immigration panics, students found a political cartoon about immigration and analyzed how immigrants were portrayed, what anxieties were represented, and connected their analysis to articles assigned that week.
Final Digital Exhibit:
Students work in groups to research a moral panic of their choosing, find artifacts related to that moral panic, and build a digital exhibit on their chosen topic.
The goal here is that students will tell a cohesive narrative or make a particular argument through the analysis of the items chosen for their exhibit.
Coming Summer 2025: The Public Website!
Coming Summer 2025: The Public Website!
As I am currently implementing this project in my Spring quarter class, the final Omeka website is not yet ready for the public. For now, the photo on the left is our current homepage. Check back later this summer to see the final website, complete with the final exhibits created by my 310 students!
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