Worrier State looks at the pervasive culture of fear in South Africa. It reveals how narratives of fear manifest in contemporary media forms and the people they serve, and how these are impacted by race, class, gender, space and identity.

Through an interdisciplinary body of work, and using a case-based study approach, media analyst Nicky Falkof investigates how risk, anxiety and moral panic show up in media portrayals in modern South Africa.

Her main intervention in this approach is through ‘affect’: how do South Africans feel about living under conditions of extreme fear, which is related to gross inequality, and how does the media make us feel?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in South Africa and the co-editor of Anxious Joburg: The inner lives of a global South city (Wits University Press: 2020)

'Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa' is published by Wits Press