My field of research is analyzing and designing human-computer interaction systems. Computerized systems and their uses are expanding in many fields, and it is important that such systems be designed to effectively support human activities. They must be symbiotic and truly adapt to individuals’ and groups’ activities, preferences and uses. My research focuses on the detailed analysis of these uses and the development of adapted representations and adaptive or support mechanisms in environments.

In particular, we are interested in the development of personalized interaction systems for learning, and in the analysis of e-commerce interactions and games with gesture-based interfaces (Kinect). We have developed various projects on the use of ontologies to organize information exchanges and adapt interfaces to the cultural context. Lastly, we are working on the development of audio-tactile interfaces for improved access to the Web and images for visually impaired users.

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).