My research program is aimed at achieving a better understanding of the situated rhetorical practices by which political and organizational players influence the interactions in which they take part. I study the constitutive role of language in different types of interactions and situations, such as spontaneous face-to-face interactions in the workplace, formal deliberation among citizens involved in public consultation hearings, or inter-organizational collaboration between stakeholders with divergent and often competing interests, backgrounds, and discourses. Thus, my research documents the many different ways in which rhetoric partakes in the establishment/perpetuation of relatively long-lasting social, material and political structures, such as a public sphere (Benoit-Barné, 2006, 2007), a technology (Benoit-Barné, 2007) or a relationship of authority (Benoit-Barné & Cooren, 2010).

I am particularly interested in three questions:

• the ways in which contemporary political actors debate controversies, in particular but not exclusively as part of arguments concerning science and technology;
• the role of objects in interactions, and the way in which players organize themselves and advance discussions through association with objects;
• how political and organizational players manage the tensions between the ideals driving them and the practical requirements of their activities.

My research interests are fueled by questions concerning the ways in which practices, discourses and cultural dispositifs (apparatuses), in their articulations to the different forms in which power is exercised, contribute to produce what prevails as if it could be taken for granted. Popular music is a fertile field for exploring these questions, given its strategic role in the shaping of identities and belongings, and the mediation of public culture, particularly in Québec. This has led me to study the valorization of top-selling products, music-related industries and policies, and the effectivity of fame/celebrity.

I am currently working on two main projects. The first one concerns small venues in Montréal. I study regimes of circulation, mainly those that orient and reconfigure "live music."   The second project deals with a music contest for people aged 65 and over. I analyze the relationships between media, memory and mobility, focusing particularly on various forms of "successful ageing" and "ageing well."

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 specialize in moving images, and my research creates a dialogue between the analysis of how identity differences are represented (sex/gender, sexuality, race and class) and transnational means of audiovisual production, diffusion and reception. For many years now, I have been contributing to feminist studies of moving images, with a specific interest in genre cinema (costume film and film noir) and screen violence. I am also interested in practices for audiovisual representation and self-representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals in Anglo-American and Francophone contexts. Finally, in a new project relating to the field of globalization and communication, I am studying a transnational network of Burmese journalists contributing to the democratization of Burma.