Full Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France and chair of the CNRS Pacte research unit (UMR 5194), a pluridisciplinary social sciences research center.
Former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Fontenay-Lyon, with an “agrégation in geography”, and a junior research fellowship at the Institut Universitaire de France.
Political geographer dedicated to border studies, my comparative analysis of the border dynamics in Latin America and in Europe (see "Après la Frontière, avec les Frontières: Dynamiques Transfrontalières en Europe", Editions de l’Aube, 2005, with Marie-Christine Fourny) has led me to formulate the notion of "mobile border" (see "Borderities, The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders", Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, with Frédéric Giraut). This work of consolidating border studies in France is reflected in the structuring of national and international networks and many reference publications (such as"Qu'est-ce qu'une Frontière aujourd'hui?", Presses Universitaires de France, 2015).
My latest research concerns the interrelations between space and art, in and about contested places, particularly borderlands. I am is a founding member of the ‘antiAtlas of borders’ collective (http://www.antiatlas.net/en/), a science-art project.
The antiAtlas of borders explores an original view of the mechanisms used for securitizing state borders, real or virtual, on land or sea, or in the air and the countersurveillance processes that deploy against them. Centring on various events, including art-science exhibitions, this project brings together researchers (in the social and hard sciences), artists (web art, tactical geography, video creators, performers, hackers), border professionals (customs officers, industrialists, soldiers), but also migrants and traffickers. It has initiated a medium (www.antiatlas-journal.net/en/) that seeks to renovate the links between text and visual media. As part of this project I have also had the opportunity to explore experimental methods in social science, in particular with the Crossing Maps workshop (https://visionscarto.net/crossing-maps). This projetc, undertook with migrants and asylum seekers, has enabled our team to raise the question of inventing new ways of producing and disseminating scientific results.
