Adam Koehler Brown
Sociology PhD Student
The New School for Social ResearchInstructor of Record
CUNY-Hunter College[email protected]
I work on culture, politics, and theory.
I am broadly interested in the meanings behind social actions.
My dissertation is entitled "Theorizing Insurrection: A Sociological Account of January 6th, 2021".
I use the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021 to develop a new sociology of democracy. I examine the representations of political leaders' bodies, the process of crowds making popular sovereignty claims, the narrative structure of stories about attacks on democracy, the difficulty of thinking with messy and contradictory icons, the tension between theoretical accounts of process and rupture, and the relationship between incitement law and charisma. In each moment, I demonstrate the uniqueness of the January 6th case and the fruitfulness of bringing cultural sociology, political theory, and continental philosophy together. This impulse, I argue, should animate future sociological analyses of democracy.I am co-advised by Andrew Arato and Julia Sonnevend.
