ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its central theme the processes of re-imposition of social order in the aftermath of a series of high-profile riots that occurred in several English cities in 2011. It examines the ontological challenges posed to the socially included by the riots and the assumed or imagined motivations of the rioters. The chapter explores the process by which images associated with news media narratives were interpreted and re-interpreted by readers, copied and shared on social media, and in the process re-imagined the riots and the rioters to produce a set of sense-making, ontologically reassuring narratives to restore the breach caused by the riots themselves and provide wider ontological reassurance for the socially included spectator in late modernity. It argues that the potential ontological challenge to social order posed by the prospect of the rioter as 'one of us', caught up and lost in the riotous crowd, was in part managed by othering the rioter as defective consumers.
