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 eleven years as a professor of international relations and American studies at the University of Ottawa's School of Political Studies. I'm happy to see my interdisciplinary inclinations find new ground via communication and media studies and to have been able to start a new chapter teaching international communication, political and media communication and popular culture, with a focus on war, infrastructure, mobility, power and media. I'm also in charge of the faculty's graduate programs in international studies, where I teach a course on the historical and contemporary role and place of the United States in the world, or the compulsory course on contemporary issues and debates in international studies.

Through communication, we are, consciously or unconsciously, in touch with the world, and I'm particularly interested in our relationship with digital governance - and by extension, digital media. I therefore pay particular attention to communication infrastructures, which leads me to study data and the new forms of control that the surveillance society puts into action in the digital age. As digital media, algorithms then become a favorite subject to better grasp both the media infrastructures of communication they embody and what they make possible as media technologies governing subjects and controlling spaces.

My current work focuses on technologies for controlling mobilities (circulation of people, capital, goods and digital data) involved in managing security risks in the digital context of Big Data, particularly with regard to borders, surveillance and governance. Thus, my research and teaching in international and political communication focus on the role of socio-technical infrastructures, power dynamics, actors, digital platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence and the political mechanisms and modalities mobilized by contemporary forms of war, security and policing in the North American context. Finally, I maintain a constant research watch on the United States' preparation for war, with all that this implies in terms of the power of imagination, security and socio-technical imaginaries, innovation and research practices for the future of warfare, and the identity-related weight of cutting-edge technology for the American national security state apparatus.

More broadly, my research is divided into three strands: 1) the surveillance of mobility and algorithmic security, war (and its issues of disinformation and information) and the technopolitical infrastructures governing North American border spaces; 2) the relationship between war and society, the militarization of everyday life and the culture of the national security state in the United States; and 3) popular culture and American media cultures, with a focus on war and surveillance on the small and big screens.

In communications and international studies, I am well served by my interdisciplinary openness and indisciplinary perspective, which draws on the fields of international relations, geography and political anthropology, international political sociology, American studies, security studies and science, technology and society studies.

At the Université de Montréal, I divide my research time between the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CÉRIUM), the Laboratoire Culture populaire, connaissance et critique (CPCC), the Laboratoire de recherche sur la technologie, l'activisme et la sécurité (LarTAS) and the Centre international de criminologie comparée (CICC). I am also a research associate at the Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l'intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA) and a research associate at UQAM's Canada Research Chair on the Secure Governance of Bodies, Mobility and Borders (GSCMF).

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.