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- Convenors:
-
Arne Harms
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Kezia Barker (Liverpool John Moores University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
The imperative to prepare for uncertain futures — cast as a moral obligation and expression of responsible citizenship — has become a defining concern in contemporary societies. What can we learn from an examination of prepping across national contexts and political expressions?
Long Abstract
Once seen as a marginal pursuit, forms of “prepping” now permeate public policy, popular culture and everyday life, revealing shifting configurations of fear and expectations of (self)governance. Authorities urge citizens to maintain emergency packs; survivalist media attract vast audiences; retailers profit from a booming market in preparedness gear; and courses in crisis response and self-sufficiency proliferate. As ecological crises intensify and liberal democratic institutions fray, the appeal of prepping broadens across the political spectrum: once emblematic of libertarian survivalism, prepping now animates projects of community resilience, ecological adaptation, and degrowth in the face of collapse.
This panel takes prepping as a lens through which to theorize how deepening polarizations and dystopian outlooks are reshaping everyday life across the world. What can we learn by attending to practices that seek to navigate or endure social and ecological breakdown, rather than avoid it? What forms of solidarity or belonging are articulated through the aesthetics and discourse of doom, or the figure of the ‘doomer’ itself? At the same time, the panel uses prepping to reconsider the role of anthropology and allied disciplines within social attempts to imagine and sustain futures under duress. If the contested figure of the doomer serves as a diagnostic of the contemporary, what might it offer to social theory? What could it mean to ‘prep’ anthropology itself — to ready the discipline for dystopian conditions — and what might a dystopia-ready, public or activist anthropology afford?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research among US preppers, mainly in Arizona, this paper explores how anticipations of collapse nurture a politics of revenge, where preparedness reshapes relations to others, erodes shared obligations, and reimagines political life beyond liberal-democratic frameworks.
Paper long abstract
In popular and media imaginaries, US preppers often appear as figures of technical competence, valued for their mastery of supplies, weapons, and survival skills. Ethnographic fieldwork among conservative preppers in the United States, primarily in Arizona, shows that these technical repertoires are inseparable from a broader moral and political orientation toward the future. Through everyday practices—stockpiling food and ammunition, training bodies, fortifying homes—preppers enact specific ways of relating to authority, obligation, and collectivity, grounded in distrust of state mediation and in the valorisation of autonomy, vigilance, and armed self-reliance.
Within these social worlds, dystopian futures are invested with a logic of revenge. Collapse is not simply feared or endured, but anticipated as a moment of moral reversal through which a world perceived as corrupted by liberal institutions will be set right. Catastrophe promises a redistribution of power and worth: dependence and protection are imagined as giving way to exposure, hierarchy, and sanction, while the prepared project themselves as legitimate bearers of authority.
Elaborating on revenge as a structuring horizon, this contribution reflects on how troubled futures reshape everyday experiences of liberalism and democracy in increasingly polarised contexts. Prepping thus appears less as a response to risk than as a lived process through which the contractual foundations of social order are destabilised and political life is reimagined beyond the moral and institutional terms of contemporary democratic pacts.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores the creation of digital solidarity and collective identity among members of Czechoslovak prepping communities. Employing digital ethnography through online observations and digital artifact analysis, it examines the collective character of prepping within a post-socialist context.
Paper long abstract
As prepping moves from the margins to the mainstream, digital platforms have become crucial arenas for negotiating crisis, belonging, and the politics of the future. This paper examines Czechoslovak digital prepping communities as sites where representations of crisis and catastrophic discourse are not merely expressions of anxiety, but active resources for building digital solidarity and collective identity.
Drawing on Stadler’s digital solidarity theory and Wenger’s communities of practice, I ask: What forms of solidarity emerge within preppers’ discourse, how do preppers use visual and textual discourse to construct community, and how do political divides manifest and get negotiated within these digital spaces?
Methodologically, it employs digital ethnography, utilizing online participant observation and digital artifact analysis ranging from posts and comment threads to images and videos, across several Czechoslovak Facebook groups dedicated to prepping and two Czechoslovak online prepping forums.
The Czech and Slovak post-socialist context, characterized by hybrid forms of citizenship that oscillate between expectations of state care and neoliberal self-reliance, provides fresh insights into predominantly US and Western European prepping, enabling me to discern how prepping is reimagined as a collective, rather than purely individual, project.
Paper short abstract
Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City shows how COVID 19 reshaped NYC and its prepper subculture. In 2026, its insights clarify ICE’s expanding reach across U.S. cities and how resilient communities mobilize to resist coercive state power.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on urban and community resilience literature, my book, Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City: Class, Resilience and Sheltering in Place offers a detailed qualitative analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on New York City and on the philosophy and practices of the city’s urban prepper subculture. In 2026, this research can also be used as a guide to trace the impact of another disease spreading across New York and other American cities -- the spread of ICE. Most important, this book can also be explored to understand how local communities are using similar network strategies to resist the efforts of ICE to arrest and remove urban citizens.
With a special focus on the height of the pandemic in New York, this book considers the city’s position as the pandemic’s first epicenter in the United States. It explores the lived experience of enduring the pandemic as reflections of class division, considering key themes, including the exodus of the wealthy, sheltering in place for the middle class, the inability to leave high-risk neighborhoods for the poor, and sheltering-in-place practices and community resilience efforts by city preppers. It analyzes the importance of good government and an engaged citizenry in developing an agenda for the city’s future, underscoring the need for cities to develop disaster management approaches that expand traditional “command and control” models to make space for local knowledge and resources. In battling against ICE, urban citizens are embracing the philosophy and strategies of urban preppers.
Paper short abstract
Belief in the possibility of a collapse of thermo-industrial society gained visibility in the French public sphere during the 2010s. This paper examines how this conviction is put into practice, through collectives preparing for the world after by settling in rural areas.
Paper long abstract
Fear of catastrophe has a long history in France, dating back even before publication of the Meadows Report in 1972. Nevertheless, it was only from the mid-2010s onward that the idea that industrial society might collapse broke out of the circles of political ecology and gained visibility in the public debate. The media success of Collapsology bears witness to this shift: collapse is framed as a probable process, at the end of which the most basic needs would no longer be provided to the population through legally regulated services. This paper draws on an ethnographic study of two collectives that emerged in rural areas of France in the late 2010s. These groups explicitly aim to prepare for the “after”, by experimenting with practices that lie somewhat outside the social mainstream, such as the management of agricultural commons, alternative exchange systems, and free-pricing arrangements. One of the arguments advanced in this paper is that, far from being marked by fatalism or reducible to forms of selfish withdrawal (as common sense often suggests), these experiments in collapse preparedness carry a distinct political dimension. Non-confrontational in nature, they reveal a form of collapsism that actualizes alternative worldview, notably through a practical critique of capitalism. Rather than merely anticipating catastrophe, these initiatives seek to outline other possible futures for the world after collapse. Studying them offers social sciences an opportunity to move beyond an understanding of critique that is limited to resistance alone, and to take seriously social experiments that prefigure alternative social orders.
Paper short abstract
The Semsrott brothers view the rise of the AfD in Germany as an obligation for citizens to take responsibility for democracy. In a series of events titled Prepping for Future, the activists develop humorous yet highly effective strategies for resilience. What have they learned from prophets of doom?
Paper long abstract
Is history repeating itself? The roaring twenties of the last century were followed by Hitler’s rise to power. The parallels with the ascent of the AfD in Berlin’s hinterland appear striking, especially from the perspective of the German capital, where an urban community still celebrates cosmopolitanism and queerness.
When Nico Semrott was member of the European Parliament for the satirical party Die Partei visitors always asked him: “What can I do as an individual?” He left Parliament in 2024; the year his brother Arne published a guide how to resist the extreme right and answered this question with concrete advice. Conclusion: Self-protection is a priority, but even a single person can make a difference.
For some time now, the brothers have been addressing these issues in a series of events titled Prepping for Future. The Semsrotts aim to make it as entertaining as possible and as serious as necessary. By testing ideas, inviting audiences to vote on them, and developing strategies collectively, their focus has gradually shifted from individual to collective action.
The series began with Prepping for Future #1 in 2025 and will conclude with #6 in 2026. How does the brothers’ diagnosis of contemporary Germany help to analyse how polarisation and fear are reshaping everyday life? How do the Semsrotts draw on aesthetics and rhetorics of doom? What can be learned from the practices of self-protection they propose? How are these connected to the protection of democracy? What forms of solidarity and belonging do their events evoke?