Braxton is a second year doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His research seeks to analyze how social movements interact with the media—and vice versa— with a focus on mainstream corporate press.

Currently, Braxton is working on two projects; With Neal Caren, Braxton is using text analysis and quantitative methods to conduct a conjoint analysis on the perceived effectiveness of social movements based on news coverage of protests; His second project, to be published in a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Political and Social Movements, gives an account of the social movement working to enact broad-scale student debt cancellation in the United States.