In this paper I introduce and explore the term “prepper pedagogy”, which I describe as an orientation to nation-building intended to educate the public to a variety of military, carceral and police logics. Prepper pedagogy refers to various survivalist practices and ways of knowing that condition pre-emptive responses to perceived threats of persistent social disorder. Prepper or “survivalist” movements, I suggest, coalesce histories of nation building, colonialism and civil militarization on the home front of international conflicts. While preppers are often perceived to be outsider social movements characterized by liberal notions of self-reliance and alt-right politics, my research considers how prepper pedagogies both perpetuate and resist the normative epistemological and ontological foundations of the settler colonial state. If, following von Clausewitz’s (1918) famous formulation, war is a continuation of state policy by other means, then prepper pedagogy is its home front.

To develop this argument, I analyze a specific technology, commissioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) during the Cold War, designed to purportedly provide an objective and scientific method for identifying civil servants who were perceived, because of their sexual orientation, to constitute a security risk (Kinsman 2004). This mobile technology, known as the “Fruit Machine”, was deployed against hundreds of suspected civil servants, some of whom were later demoted and or/removed from their positions (Kinsman 2004). As a result of advocacy by the LGBT group Egale Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently offered a formal apology and financial compensation to those who had been affected by the program (CBC 2017). The “fruit machine” and its related sex-normative curriculum, I suggest, is an example of prepper pedagogy in which nation building takes shape as pre-emptive domestic practice of surveillance and securitization. What binds these moments together, I argue, is the operative logic of pre-emption that works to produce and maintain those who are other to the colonial and imperial project of nation building, something constructed as much within the nation as directed towards those so-called enemies without.

Sara is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of violence, war and social conflict in the global context. One of her interests is the relationship between war, visual culture and nation building, a focus she explores in a current curatorial project entitled „Surveillance and Nation Building in Canada: 1945-2011“. Along with Dr. Dina Georgis at the University of Toronto, she directs the SSHRC funded Research Creation Project „Surveillant Subjectivities: Digital Youth Cultures, Art and Affect“. In addition to her academic-based work, Sara curates aesthetic projects that archive visual encounters with legacies of war and social trauma. Her critical art writing has appeared in PUBLIC, FUSE Magazine and in exhibition essays for the Art Gallery of Bishops University, YYZ, the Ottawa Art Gallery and as a blog for Gallery TPW.

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