My research focuses on contemporary changes in the modes of production of urban spaces, mainly within cities in the Global South. The term "production" should be understood in a broad sense. First, it designates the actors of the urban fabric, such as developers, builders, brokers or architects, as well as their strategies and practices. Second, the term production designates the actors and processes that condition the fabric of urban spaces, such as urban planners, the urban projects, and the set of regulations and laws of the urban planning and managment. Third, the concept of production also refers to the action of the inhabitants and social groups who appropriate urban spaces and projects.

In my research, hilighting the mechanisms of the urban production allows me to better understand the logics of exclusion and marginalization that are attached to it. By studying power relations between actors, strategies for bypassing established norms and legal frameworks, or the economic strategies of the accumulation of capital, I identify and try to explain the inequal access to urban ressources, the power relations between actors and groups, and the mechanisms that are exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities.

My research is at the intersection of many research fields, such as urban studies, political economy or Asian studies. My theretical approaches also draw from human and social geography, political geography, urban planning, and political studies. My current researches focus on land and real estate issues, financialization, and on the impact of planning and development strategies in urban production. I am particularly interested in the effects of these dynamics on local territories and on the local population.

While continuing my work in Cambodia, I also carry out research on Myanmar, mainly in Yangon. I am also involved in research projects in Vietnam and Montreal. Through my fieldwork in South-East Asia, I also look at how political authoritarianism produces specific governance regimes, which determine the different logics of production of the city.

My methodological approaches are mainly qualitative. I favor field researches, observations and interviews with actors and inhabitants. I also mobilize spatial analysis and mapping to better understand the changes of land use patterns, or the evolution settlement processes. While my scales of analysis are mainly local and go through specific case studies, my politico-economic oriented researches are using various scales of analysis (regional, international, trasnational...).

I joined the department in 2017, after spending eleven years as a professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. I am happy to have found a new terrain in communication and media studies and to have started a new chapter teaching international communication, media studies, political communication, and popular culture at Université de Montréal.

I am first and foremost fascinated by the relationship between culture, science, media, technology and society, power/knowledge, militarization, and war and security in the US context and in the geopolitical frame set by globalization. My current work brings me to consider issues dealing with the security/mobility nexus and the redefinition of citizenship in the digital age, notably as it relates to borders, surveillance, and governance. 

Through communication, we are, consciously or unconsciously in relation with the world. I am heavily interested in our relationship with digital governance – and by extension, to digital media. I thus pay a particular attention to communication infrastructures in security governance, which leads me to study new forms of surveillance in the surveillance society enacted by the digital. As digital media and new media, algorithms are a privileged topic to capture the media infrastructures for the communications they  embody as well as to what they make possible for media technologies governing subjects and controlling spaces.

My current research coalesces around the forms of surveillance three main areas of inquiry: 1) the surveillance of mobilities, algorithmic security, and techno political infrastructures governing North American borderlands; 2) the militarization of everyday life, the surveillance society, and the culture of  the US national security state; 3) US popular and media cultures, with an emphasis on war and surveillance on the small and big screen and another on comedy, infotainment media, and televisual satire.

In my research, I both mobilize communication and media studies, notably popular culture, cultural industries and cultural studies scholarship, as well as issues of mobility and surveillance, with a reflection that addresses power manifestations in communication and the effects of communications. As international communication, media cultures, political communication, popular culture, cultural studies, and new media studies constitute my main research expertise in media studies and communication, my work is well served by my interdisciplinary bent and undisciplined perspective that draws upon the fields of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, political anthropology, American studies, security studies, and science and technology studies.

At Université de Montréal, I share my research time between the Laboratory on Popular Culture, Knowledge, and Critique (CPCC), the International Center on Comparative Criminology (CICC), and the Montreal Center for International Studies (CERIUM). 

I have taught the international history of Canada and Quebec at Université de Montréal since 2011. My goal as a historian is to use cultural and social history, as well as postcolonial studies, to obtain and promote a deeper understanding of the history of Canada and Quebec in the world, and the way in which their international activities (governmental and non-governmental) have shaped and been shaped by the lived experiences of the peoples living in the northern portion of North America. I employ international history to explore Canada and Quebec as projects of rule, while situating them and their populations in global currents.

My first book, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada-Québec-France Triangle, 1944-1970 (UBC Press, 2012), examines the complex triangular dynamic between Canada, Quebec and France by situating this in the broader currents of the history of globalization. It explores the concept of “nation” in an increasingly interconnected world, and parallel to this, the efforts to manage multiple overlapping identities. This monograph also is part of my ongoing effort to shed light on the question of “empire” in Canadian and Quebec history. These research interests also led to my co-editing a volume that offers and encourages a critical reinterpretation of Canadian international history through the prism of race Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (UBC Press, 2017). 

I also explore the history of settler colonialism in Canada and Quebec, as it is impossible to understand Canadian and Quebec international history without referring to the complex history of the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and settlers. This idea also underpins my current research project, an exploration of the entangled history of Canadian development assistance after 1945 and Indigenous-Canadian relations.