Sheltering at the End of the World: Exploring Prepping Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand

Prepping is a contested term used to describe the activities of people taking material action to mitigate the impacts of perceived future crisis scenarios, from earthquakes or floods to social collapse or apocalyptic nuclear events. How do preppers in Aotearoa New Zealand understand, imagine, or experience crisis, and what do their responses anticipate for future social arrangements?

I argue that prepping involves diverse anticipatory epistemologies that necessitate engagements with particular material practices. Thus, prepping can be best understood as a form of prefigurative politics, embodying new structures of relationality at familial, community and state levels. Using ethnographic data from interviews and participant observation with self-identified preppers across the North Island of New Zealand, I trace the relationship between specific settler colonial imaginaries and contemporary prepping utopias.