Cultivating suspicion: an ethnography.

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Junck, Leah Davina.
Imprint:	Mankon, Bamenda : Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, 2019
Description:	1 online resource
Language:	English
Subject:	Xenophobia -- South Africa. Social conditions. Xenophobia. South Africa -- Social conditions. South Africa.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12294784

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9789956550081 9956550086 9789956550197 9956550191
Notes:	Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed May 7, 2019)
Summary:	At the heart of 21st century discourses are questions of whose lives may matter more than others. While the debates themselves are not new, the #hashtags they are linked to and the media through which concerns around moralities of living together are expressed allow for debates to reach large numbers of people in accelerated, individualised and accessible ways. The new media have been powerful in (re)igniting debates and (re)activating demands for social change. Yet, the focus of ubiquitous #hashtags on binary positions may render it easy to neglect their nuances and facets. In recognition of grey-zones, contradictions and ambiguities, this ethnography focuses on a suburb of Cape Town, Observatory, and its recently revived Neighbourhood Watch as an urban renewal project and attempt to decrease notions of vulnerability to crime and violence. In Observatory -- considered to be liberal and bohemian by its inhabitants -- the framing of topics within the Neighbourhood Watch group often take on an abstract, intellectualised form. Nevertheless, the group with its rather clashing ideals is grounded in and fuelled by recycled crime stories as well as snapshots of suspected criminals that continue to reappear via various social media channels. Individual experiences, stories and inner conflicts of local Neighbourhood Watch members are at the centre of this exploratory engagement with how fear becomes embodied, everyday practice and the ways in which desires for relationality and spatial exclusivity become entangled in a place where every life matters only in principle.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Contextualising crime
Inserting the self in the field : How to 'do' research on vulnerability and ethnographic methods as ethics
The everyday texture and architecture of fear in the suburb : patrollers and their strategies and accessories of security
The Phantom Suspect : Cultivating and embodying suspicion in Observatory
Dancing with the devil : patrolling as performance
'Couch patrolling' and the virtual embodiment of the Observatory Neighbourhood Watch
Conclusions : Masking vulnerability and other comforts of being a patroller.

Cultivating suspicion: an ethnography.

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