Since graduate school, I have often worked in communication and social media management.

I co-founded the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Research with Laurent Matthey when I was a graduate student at the University of Lausanne in 2005 and managed its website until 2015. In ten years, the rather confidential publication has progressively become a journal read by 9,000 people every month.

In Denmark, I set up the digital strategy of the Centre for Border Region Studies (CBRS) of the University of Southern Denmark and developed its website, Twitter and Facebook accounts, in collaboration with Tobias Haimin Wung-Sung.

I am currently working at increasing the national and international recognition of the University of Florida Sahel Research Group, a collaborative effort to understand the political, social, economic and cultural dynamics of the Sahel. Our website is the cornerstone of the Group’s digital presence while our Twitter and Facebook accounts connect us with the large academic and policy community.

A geographer by training, I think that a good map is often worth a thousand words (and a lot of hard work). Since the mid 2010s, I have worked on some of the most exciting mapping projects in West Africa, including the Atlas of the Sahara-Sahel. Published by the OECD in 2014, the atlas contains more than 100 original maps, such as the one below, where Olivier Pissoat, Daniel Krüger and I mapped the location of violent events in North and West Africa from 1997 to 2012.

More recently, I have used social network analysis to map connections between traders, policy-makers or terrorists in West Africa. On the graph below, made for the OECD, node colors represent countries and link widths represent poverty differentials between regions in West Africa. The size of the nodes is proportional to the number of connections each region has, a measure known as degree centrality.