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I first researched tourism as a leisure engagement with selected places. I investigated the intersection of tourism and outdoor sports in order to understand how certain specialised practices lead to travelling by attracting participants to particular environments; how they become the object of strong affective and material engagements; and how they create dynamic communities of practice.

I currently work on tourism as a political object and a knowledge object, within the FNS project on tourism quantification. As a temporary practice of the city, tourism may have serious effects on local life and economy. Efforts made to quantify the phenomenon may serve both the support to the economic sector and the contestation of its disruptive power on the functioning of the city. Tourism figures are increasingly integrated in public debate, although tourism frequentation as well as tourists' practices in cities are famously hard to apprehend.

Within the project Overtourism ?..., we examine the quantification of tourism by investigating the projects, practices, processes, institutional structures or semantic structures that are constructed to allow translating a social phenomenon in numbers. This perspective is directly inscribed in A. Desrosières' sociology of quantification, as well as in science and technology studies. It aims at de-naturalising statistics by showing how they are embedded in political projects. This perspective also allows to explore the different use of statistics as arguments in public debate, or to delve into the evolution of quantification techniques, for instance in the case of tourism, the increasing importance of big data and digital or mobile phone companies.

I explore geographical phenomena through the notion of spatialities, or spatial dimensions of social phenomena; and through practices, or shared and relatively regular schemes of action. Such a perspective allows, for outdoor sport tourism for instance, to understand how regularities and social groups ("communities of practice") form around bodily-material engagements, aesthetic and affective interests, and specific spatial knowledge.

I explored these sport activities for their propensity to select specific environments as sites of practice, and their propensity to valorize these environments in particular for their "natural" appearance. The most desirable of these places become "hotspots", and tourist destinations for the communities of practice.

I'm interested in how digital apparatuses equip practices, for instance how they accompany and facilitate leisure, sport and travel practices, and give a renewed importance to images and information. I'm also interested in digital technologies as socio-economic structures ("platform urbanism"), as producing new models of knowledge and information circulation ("big data"), or even of government through "data".