Research

Current activities

Because – or thanks to – my weird, multidisciplinary background, my work tend to follow two directions: audiovisual work and space technologies (both include diving).

Besides commissions I receive from magazines or organizations as an underwater photographer, my current research and audiovisual work focusses on the articulation of gender-based violence and ecological damage. It builds on Feminist philosophy and ecologies, but also on Indigenous traditional knowledge, to reflect on how the trauma of gender-based violences (including sexual assault) is linked to nature’s human-induced damage, exploitation, or mutation. Through writings, photography, and collaborative methods, this research aims at building a visually-engaged language around the idea of somatized bodies as a form of ecological resilience. So far, this research led to the development of two photographic series: “Cosmic Waters” (to be published in Storytelling of water: About photography, ethnography, and Feminist ecologies), and “Aqueous Bodies” (ongoing). Both series are partially visible in the Portfolio section of this website.

Because I sometimes need to ground my work in concrete materialities and see what impact I can contribute to create, I also work as a consultant and test diver for an underwater and space habitat start-up (Spartan Space). This part of my activities focusses on human factors (HF) in the conception, design and utilisation of life support systems (including habitats infrastructures and IVA/EVA suits), enlarging human factors to gender, ethnicity, and social-historical dynamics. For ex., I’m developing an approach of aerospace ergonomics based on science and technology history to better understand the cultural origin and framework of related infrastructures. Based on my previous research on astronaut training and my flying experience, I also develop flight standards and procedures for the equipment I contribute to develop and test.

Until 2021, my research was organised into three themed categories:

The material culture of human spaceflight and its politics

It includes publications about the role of space industries in the Europeanization-Nationalization nexus; model of governance based on space technology and interopoerability of space stations systems; the relation between political power and transportation according to political ideals; and the use of objects and perception of the environment in the daily life during spaceflights. More recently, this theme emphasizing the ‘material’ social logics of human spaceflight, with a focus on the bodies-environment relationship, led me to develop cooperative works with designers, architects, artists, and social scientists interested into the conceptualization of future Moon habitats.

Cosmologies, colonialism and identity-building

From the Native-American criticism of the NASA space program in the 1960-70 to indigenous mobilizations against space launch facilities in French Guinea, ancestral and animist systems of beliefs in colonized cultures outline how much space exploration is not a universal ambition embedded in the human being’s nature but a cultural construction related to a certain relationship with the Earth, celestial bodies, territory, and political exercise. Moreover, it appears that cosmological cultures influence, more or less directly, both domestic space strategies and the role of these policies in identity politics. Currently, I am investigating this topic in the cases of South Africa (see the documentary “Looking for Afronauts”), and Russia.

A microsociology of international relations

This third theme includes publications emphasizing the training of astronauts and cosmonauts as a moral and carnal education structured around endurance; the gender norms that it involves; the circulation of traditions related to the Soviet space age and of models of masculinity; the role of the training for the ISS and the daily management of ground support activities in international relations among ISS partners. Since 2019, this section of my work especially emphasizes globalisation — through the internationalization of Russian training methods in emerging countries (especially South Africa), the consequent circulation of industrial standards and inherited know-how, and the economic and strategic agreements that frame those circulations.

All these projects contributed to a common thread: unveiling the social, material and bodily dynamics of human space exploration, furthermore empirically.

Another project, started in early 2021, continued my work on space politics to expand it to nontraditional territories:

Security beyond Terra: how territoriality shapes SOVEREIGNTY in ‘extreme’ environments 

As once recalled by the geographer Stuart Elden, the English language has different roots for territory and geopolitics, both related to earth. This linguistic, ontological relationship with the terrestrial ground is now, however, progressively replaced with other ideas. Geopolitics is not limited to the ‘geo’ in the sense of territory wherein politics take place and are exercised. How do ‘extreme’ territories (e.g., Antarctica, outer space, and underwater environments) affect the exercise of sovereignty, while the latter remains inextricably related to territoriality? Understudied in political theory, these ‘extreme’ territories share common features: they detain transborder resources whose uses are hardly regulated by law; they require international regulation coordinated by international organisations; they have difficult access and living conditions requiring specific techniques and technological know-how; they are trading routes; their ‘exploration’ is conceived as a sign of national prestige; they are considered as potential sites for commercialisation and tourism; and, doing so, they shape hierarchies among States depending on their financial and technological resources. These territories are also fantasised in cultural imagination and moored in colonial narratives, wherein ‘exploration’ and national expansion often goes along with scientific expeditions. While redefining the role, representations and uses of territory in national sovereignty, these territories also tend to become central strategic fields in the coming decade: they are spaces where terrestrial conflicts can expand (for instances, over the exploitation of local resources), forcing the development of innovative forms of warfare.