Researching Prepper Culture: A Narrative Criminological Perspective

• In Event: Innovative Research Methods in Cultural Criminology

Abstract

We argue that attention to narrative can add much to ethnographic research on deviance and culture. Engaging with the recently burgeoning literature around narrative criminology, we focus on the particular benefits of thinking about narrative in the ethnographic field (rather than at the analysis stage). In so doing, we draw on one case study: research grounded within the USA’s contemporary ‘doomsday’ prepping movement. First, we consider the impact of researchers’ use of storytelling when entering a subcultural field – drawing attention to the ways in which the narratives researchers share with respondents about their aims can shape their access to stigmatised fields of activity (such as prepping). Second, we explore the ways that respondents’ perceptions of an ethnographer’s ‘Otherness’ throughout various stages of ethnographic research can serve to both hinder and enhance their research – and how researchers may seek to productively manage the extent (and ways) in which they appear to be familiar and unfamiliar with aspects of their participants’ social worlds. These reflections address researching within the context of the highly ‘polarized’ American cultural climate prepping sits within, and in which various forms and degrees of ‘Otherness’ have equal potential to close-down and open-up empathetic engagement between researchers and respondents.

Authors

• Michael Mills, University of Kent

• Jennifer Fleetwood, Goldsmiths, University of London