This article argues for the need to unpack the concept of moral panics to avoid reductive accounts that obscure diverse interpretations and lived experiences. Engaging the concepts of fear, visual culture, and the gaze, the notion of the paedophilic gaze is developed. Central to this framework is the invisibility of the paedophile. Drawing on four empirical cases of playgrounds, “mild nudity” in art, and a water sprinkler—the article shows how the moral panic of the invisible paedophile has moved into the everyday lives of children and adults. The article argues that Cohen’s concept of moral panic is not enough when a panic becomes institutionalized.
This paper analyzes the absence of moral panic surrounding the genocide of Palestinian children, challenging the Human Rights declarations. This absence is structural, produced through the intersection of settler colonialism, necropolitics, and Orientalism/Islamophobia, operating within neoliberalism and Israeli exceptionalism. Palestinian children are positioned within a racialized hierarchy as part of an “elimination project”. This is sustained through Islamophobic logic that casts Palestinians as existential threats. Processes of adultification and “unchilding” construct children as “disposable”. These dynamics are reinforced through narratives that frame Palestinian children as inherently “pre-terrorists or future terrorists”. Hence, normalizing and legitimizing the absence of moral panic.
This article establishes a dialogue between the fields of participatory action research, social innovation and social entrepreneurship, by presenting learning from two projects with young people in Colombia and critically situating it within intersectional, intergenerational and international power relations. We suggest that social innovation and social entrepreneurship should be considered as avenues to change and transformation as possible outcomes of participatory action projects. Participatory action research-enabled social innovation and entrepreneurship can provide opportunities for young people to succeed within a market logic whilst also resisting against its exploitative economic models that fail to serve these young people and their communities.
Children’s play and its significance is evidenced by the plethora of work around play as a field or research/inquiry, as praxis, as lived experiences and as a safeguarded right. The field of research in early childhood and play is growing; however, very limited research exists on young children’s experiences of social-play spaces in public life, particularly indoors. We argue that Play Cafes, if created with intention, pedagogy, meraki, love and de/anticolonial work, are conceptualised as important types of informal high-quality play/social provisions in public life for young children and carers, as life-affirming and as spaces for intergenerational and intersectional activism.
