Craft and getting ready for the apocalypse: the case of preppers

Recent organization studies have increasingly examined craft as a site for exploring alternatives to dominant models of production and organizing, especially in times of global uncertainty, environmental fragility, conflicts, and precariousness. This paper shifts attention to a setting in which craft is mobilised not as an aspirational alternative, but as a practical response to anticipated societal breakdown: preppers. Preppers prepare for scenarios of systemic disruption , in which markets, infrastructures, and public institutions are expected to fail. In such scenarios, survival is understood to depend on material resources and, crucially, on practical skills. Craft, in this context, is reconfigured as a set of everyday practices of making, repairing, and maintaining life under harsh and uncertain conditions. Methodologically, the paper presents one component of a planned mixed-method research design, namely a topic-modelling analysis of nearly three million posts and comments from the two largest prepper communities on Reddit . This analysis is followed by a qualitative thematic analysis of key threads on skill acquisition. To support topic interpretation, the authors also conducted two months of netnography. The topic-modelling analysis identifies 31 analytically meaningful topics, which are aggregated into five thematic sets that capture how preppers orient their discussions and practices toward anticipating collapse, provisioning essential resources, securing shelter and mobility, assembling material tools, and acquiring and preserving knowledge. Rather than presenting craft as a prefigurative or resistant alternative, the paper positions it as a pragmatic mode of organizing oriented toward endurance, continuity, and coping in the face of anticipated systemic failure.