Research Seminar - We Are All Preppers Now: Doomsday preppers, climate activists and subcultures of imminent collapse.

We Are All Preppers Now: Doomsday preppers, climate activists and subcultures of imminent collapse

Presented by: Dr Tom Doig

Date: Friday 16 September 2022
Time: 12–1pm
Location: Online via Zoom and in-person at the SCA Writer's Studio (Level 6, Michie Building)

Abstract

This presentation will discuss Dr Doig’s research into doomsday prepper, survivalist and climate activist subcultures, with a focus on Aotearoa New Zealand. This is an ongoing creative non-fiction / narrative journalism project, which uses methods including media analysis, oral history interviews and participant-observation. The research to date suggests that since the COVID-19 pandemic, the sociocultural category of ‘prepper’ has undergone significant depathologisation and ‘mainstreaming’, as members of the general public reassess their own attitudes towards disasters, risk and emergency-preparedness. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of new subcategories of prepper: ‘Sunday preppers’, ‘fitness preppers, ‘financial preppers’, and so on. In the face of this definitional fuzziness and inconsistency, I propose that the concept of ‘prepping’ is best understood as simultaneously 1) a belief system and 2) a set of material practices, as well as 3) a self-identity. This presentation will also present preliminary findings from research in Aotearoa New Zealand, which suggests that some ‘Kiwi preppers’ exhibit political and ideological views quite distinct from the prevailing US stereotypes of preppers as right-wing, libertarian and misanthropic. 

Presenter

Dr Tom Doig is a Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Hazelwood (Penguin Random House, 2020), The Coal Face (Penguin Books Australia, 2015) and Mörön to Mörön: Two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure (Allen & Unwin, 2013), and the contributing editor of Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices from Aotearoa (Bridget Williams Books, 2020).