How to survive the end of the future

Preppers, pathology, and the everyday crisis of insecurity

Bibliographic Data

ID8962855
AuthorsK Barker (0000-0001-7602-9895, Department of Geography Birkbeck, University of London London UK, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume45
Issue2
Pages483-496
Publication date2019-12-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12362
PMID32612296
OpenAlexW2994034848
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited38

Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet "preppers," a sub-culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative-material practices, concerning "value," "temporalities," and "crisis." I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis

Political science · Global Security and Public Health · Health and Conflict Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

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