Crime in the suburbs: a critical discourse analysis of how suburban residents of South Africa, and the United States talk about crime on local Facebook groups

Maguire, Zachary

Crime in the suburbs: a critical discourse analysis of how suburban residents of South Africa, and the United States talk about crime on local Facebook groups

Thesis / Dissertation

2024

Abstract

This dissertation aims to explore the ways in which suburban residents of Cape Town South Africa, and New Jersey, USA use local Facebook groups to talk about crime. While these locations may have many differences, in their respective local Facebook groups they exhibit very similar fears around crime. As suburban development continues to grow in both these countries, examining the culture these spaces help shape remains a valuable project. Notably, authors such as Rachel Heiman, and Nina Eliasoph have worked to outline the ways in which suburban residents work to create and sustain their identity in an American suburban context. Nicky Falkof has worked to do the same for the South African context, showing how fear of crime is reproduced on local Facebook groups. However, this dissertation aims to take these concepts a step further through conceptualizing this culture of fear as a global phenomenon and linking together these two locations. Utilizing scholarship on colonialism, and whiteness, this dissertation will illustrate how local Facebook groups work to reinforce an existing ideological construction of suburban spaces built on colonial ideals of domesticity, and individualism. Through a critical discourse analysis of posts and comments found on local suburban groups, in New Jersey and Cape Town, I illustrate how these spaces serve as key locations for the performance of a middle-class position, where residents work to both contest and reinforce middle-class ideals, of personal responsibility, and rational discourse. All of this is then framed in an economic and social situation of increasing precarity, wherein suburbs and their residents are forced to make sense of increasingly unstable subject positions.