How do people act when the future is both uncertain and urgent?

My first book examines how ordinary individuals transform sprawling fears of catastrophe into lines of action that feel rational and moral. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork with a fifty-member prepper group in metropolitan Southern California, A Rational Apocalypse traces how preppers use stories about the future to bind chaos into what I call under-certainty, recast those narratives as moralized risks, and “reveal” rational courses of action.

While sociology has long critiqued rational-actor models and scholars of science have long examined uncertainty among experts, A Rational Apocalypse turns attention to non-experts whose lives, as they see it, depend on getting these calculations right. In doing so, it illuminates the cultural micro-foundations of rational action in an increasingly uncertain world — and argues that rational action is not a method of controlling uncertainty, but a cultural product of our attempts to live with what we cannot control.