I debated for a while about whether I would inform you guys that I had written this paper, but in the end I have decided that posting the essay on TA is a desirable choice because I believe that some of you will be interested in the topic that it investigates. Furthermore, I would like to see what individuals who take the time to critically read my essay think about the arguments I make, the distinctions I highlight, and so on.

For my third-year Young Offenders class the students are required to write a major research paper on a topic of one's choice. I elected to examine the rave subculture. There are two basic domains with which the essay is concerned: 1) raves and moral panic theory; and 2) raves and subcultural explanations of youth deviance. The paper looks not only at raves in general but also at the rave-related social and political changes that occurred in Toronto during the winter of 1999 to the summer of 2000 (most notably where then Mayor Lastman succeeded in having raves on city-property banned through a city council vote). Because of the commercialization of the rave scene over the past few years, the essay is primarily focussed upon what I may call the 'real' / 'original' / 'true' rave scene--the paper highlights the fact that 'raves' as such have given way to the 'rave-nightclub' phenomenon.

For those of you who may be interested in reading this paper (and presenting me with your review), I have uploaded the MS word document to the following link: http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.p...7DA55494477AC4C

I should also note that this is principally an academic paper: insofar as I present a number of arguments, the paper is indeed argumentative; but insofar as the essay examines the issue through the eyes of criminologists, sociologists, and scholars in various other disciplines, it is not a survey into my beliefs or anybody else's particular beliefs concerning the rave experience.

I will end this post by pasting a copy of the essay's introduction for those who are unsure as to whether reading the paper is truly worth your time.

I look forward to any comments on the paper--whether you agree with what you will read is independent of my belief that many of you will enjoy an examination of the culture with which we are all so intimately enmeshed.

P.S. I'm not really concerned with being told about grammatical errors, e.g. that a particular word is spelled wrong--I will review the essay once more tomorrow before I submit it

Nick



INTRODUCTION
This paper will be concerned with an investigation of the 'rave' phenomenon; in particular, it will focus upon the following two points. First, via the standpoint of a moral panic discourse, the essay will examine raves (in general) as well as the changes in societal attitudes toward Toronto's rave culture that arose following three rave-related deaths of Ontario youths in 1999 and which culminated in the May 2000 temporary ban on raves conducted on city-owned property . A basic awareness of the dynamics of moral panic theory will be assumed in order to allow the essay to explicate how the actions of the media and certain key agents of social control exemplify three key tenets of moral panic theory as originally conceived by Stanley Cohen: during times of moral panic a) the deviant, particularly when he/she is not perceived as a member of an outside group, is seen as posing a significant threat to the social order because he/she has unacceptably 'stepped over a boundary'; b) the media and agents of social control assign the deviant a specific kind of label or social type and manage to carry out a process of symbolization in which members of society begin to automatically identify the deviant and his/her activities with negative images; and c) the media and individuals in positions of power, e.g. the police, engage in processes of exaggeration of the supposed threat posed by the problem and prediction of the inevitable recurrence of similarly dangerous events. Second, the paper will argue that the rave subculture--a primarily youth/adolescent-based community--has yet to be adequately 'explained' by group-deviance-causation theories. More specifically, the rave subculture is still somewhat opaque to criminologists in two ways: 1) neither can the American nor the British-based traditional subcultural theories of youth deviance satisfactorily elucidate the meaning of the rave phenomenon; and 2) the effectiveness of more recent, updated subcultural theories is limited insofar as research (including recent Canadian research) reveals that ravers themselves tend not to express homogeneous reasons for their involvement in the culture, and this results in the relative 'unknowability' of the rave realm.

Last edited by Nicolas Oliver on Nov-30-2006 at 22:48