Rob Boddice

Panic presents a confusion of semantics and experiences confounded by disciplinary divergences. Panic is an individual physiological response to being starved of air, a social and collective experience, a medical-diagnostic subcategory of anxiety, a moral upheaval driven by media spectres, and the cause of the sudden bursting of economic bubbles. Panic has become the byword for the effects of crisis, disaster and disease as well as for the experience that immediately precedes crisis and disaster, whether on an individual or on a mass scale. Panic has distinct definitions in sociology, psychology, medical practice, physiology, and economics. Panic Studies aims to bring these diverse disciplines together, to unify and collectively disrupt understandings of panic, and to clarify some of this conceptual confusion. It aims to better understand the situational experience of panic and the politics of the construction of panic states, and to provide tools for greater understanding of the conditions and treatment of both panic disorders and societal level panic events.