I specialize in mass media and new and emerging technologies, and my research interests focuses on exploring how technologies and people co-evolve in vast hybrid networks. My research and publications deal with “mobile culture” in everyday life, the cascade effect and the interrelations between technologies and new communication rituals and interactions. My other research interests include formative and summative research for youth and media, broadcasting policies, and the political and cultural appropriation of media. 

I am interested in the influence of traditional media like television from the viewpoint of their convergence with interactive platforms like the Internet and social networks. I am studying how these means of communication can be profitably used for social campaigns designed to promote health or political involvement. I recommend an approach derived from dual theories (communication and other social sciences) and based on methodological diversity (both quantitative and qualitative). I am also examining cultural differences in the way young adults appropriate communication technologies.

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'm an Associate Professor in media studies, media arts, and research-creation. I work primarily at the intersection of media aesthetics, material and visual cultures, and history and philosophy of science and technology. I’m particularly interested in my current research in print and paper histories, technologies, and practices.

I’m currently working on a book called High-Tech Paper: Security Printing and the Aesthetics of Trust, a historical and theoretical study of security printing and document aesthetics that investigates the material protocols of identification, authentication, and recognition.

I’m also co-directing a collaborative project on sleep. The Sociability of Sleep is an interdisciplinary research-creation project exploring the epistemologies and equities of sleep. We are interested in both the everyday and the exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. Our approach is rooted in art-science experimentation, collaboration, prototyping, and various forms of “critical making” that integrate and engage with qualitative or quantitative research data. We aim for interventions into sleep in art, design, media, and performance to generate novel sleep situations that can enrich knowledge, understanding, and normative treatment of sleep conditions, as well as the collective care of all sleepers.

My research has concerned or concerns the economics of cultural industries, statistics in the fields of culture and communication, successful cultural products like best-sellers, media history, sound recording, television programming, and advertising. I regularly collaborate with the Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec.