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After receiving my PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University in 2006, and prior to joining Laurier, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University (2006-2008). My research and scholarly work falls within the fields of Communication and Cultural Studies. I was on-site chair of the Canadian Association for Cultural Studies from 2012-2016. I am currently book review editor for TOPIA: Canadian Journal for Cultural Studies. I am also currently the president of the Canadian branch of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music).
My research is generally concerned with the intersection of media, technology, and identity within the context of religious, social and cultural movements. I have worked extensively within the field of religion and media with my own work exploring Haitian Vodou in the diaspora, how new media and technology shape diasporic experience, and representations of Vodou and Voodoo in popular culture.
Other research focuses on social networking around conceptualizations of the Black diaspora and Black technologized subjectivity. This work takes many forms, most extensively in an examination of hip hop as both alternative media and public discourse in Canada.
Recent work on social networking and alternative media explores discourses of alternative health.
- 2017: Merit Award (Wilfrid Laurier University)
- 2011-2014: Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (Hip Hop Publics).
- 2010: Merit Award (Wilfrid Laurier University).
I am willing to, and interested in, supervising students in Communication Studies and the CAST (Cultural Analysis and Social Theory) programs who have a wide range of interests, including race, media, and technology; religion and media; alternative media and social movements; citizen/social/participatory media; popular music; media and diaspora; transnational media; alternative health.
- "The Edges of the Pandemic: Pseudoscience, Alternative Medicine, and Belief in the Age of COVID," TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Special Issue, 41. 2020. 42-49
- "'Sounds Like Haiti': Haiti as Muse in Canadian Popular Music," Popular Music and Society, 44:3. 2021.
- "The Impossibility of Being Drake: Or What it Means to be a Successful (Black) Canadian Rapper," Global Hip Hop Studies, 1:1. 2020. 95-114.
- "Techno Vodou: Transnational Flows in the Spiritual Marketplace," The Media and Religious Authority, Stewart Hoover (ed.). Penn State University Press, 2016. 193-208
- "Religion in the Afrosphere: The Constitution of a Blogging Counterpublic," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 38:4, 2015.
- KS203 Popular Culture & Ideology
- KS330 Myths, Monsters, & Machines
- KS340 Hip Hop Publics: The Case of Drake (special topic)
- CS400 Remix Culture
- CS414 Global Sounds
- CQ640 Exit Democracy
Contact Info:
Office location: DAWB 2-130
Languages spoken: English, French