Worrier State

Nicky Falkof is a writer and academic based in Johannesburg, where she is currently Associate Professor of Media Studies at Wits. Her books include The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa and the edited collections Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa and Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City.

Worrier State deals with powerful social phenomena that recur under late capitalism. These collective states of persistent negative emotion, what Zygmunt Bauman called ‘cultures of fear’, rest on a shared sense that we are not safe, that something out there – something other – threatens us in existential ways. Much of the scholarly writing on cultures of fear focuses on the wealthy nations of the global north. The south, and Africa in particular, is often dismissed as merely the source of the fears that plague northern citizens, from terrorists and immigrants to novel diseases and environmental threats. These persistently colonial representations treat Africa as a homogenous mess of teeming hordes and bad hygiene. But what happens if we think about cultures of fear within rather than about South Africa? How does fear intersect with economic precarity, inequality, violence and the ongoing consequences of racial capitalism? And what happens to the contemporary explosion of moral panics, urban legends and other paranoid narratives when they manifest here? Worrier State approaches these questions using four disparate case studies: the far-right myth of ‘white genocide’; so-called satanist murders of young women; fear of crime in a Johannesburg township; and social theories about risk and safety in the suburbs. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of work, the book examines how risk, anxiety and moral panic – central components of South Africa’s culture of fear – manifest in media representations of these four very different stories. These essays present an always-partial and necessarily contingent picture of some of the ways in which cultures of fear structure life and meaning for various people in various communities. They show how narratives of fear underpin everyday life, informing both self-making and meaning-making in contemporary South Africa.

This webinar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Department of Sociology.

• SC199 Career Development and Making a Difference

Essex students within the department can attend this event as part of eligibility criteria for module SC199. Once attended, you can complete a short reflection on what you learned by attending the event. This can be downloaded via Moodle and then uploaded to FASER.