Amy Cooter – “This is not exactly what you think it is”

In this episode of extremely, Oren Segal speaks with Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Vanderbilt University, about her ethnographic research on the militia movement in the U.S.

Amy, who has interviewed militia members directly and observed their training firsthand, is not “a stereotypical academic.” She says that while most militias “see themselves as fundamentally local,” that started to change when they “became more willing than they had been for a number of years to quite literally bump shoulders with more extreme groups at protests and at other events they thought captured” shared concerns.

Amy tells Oren she initially thought she was going to be a chemist but got bored with it and took a sociology class. She realized “people were more interesting to study because there’s always a bit of an unknown factor” and they are “not as controllable as something that we are putting in test tube and trying to figure out.”

More on Amy’s work: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/sociology/bio/?who=amy-cooter

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