My research examines everyday security: how security institutions and their practitioners interpret risk, translate policy, and exercise judgment through routine practice. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork across Canada, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, I study policing, counterterrorism, counter-extremism, and security-sector reform as institutional processes rather than only as formal policies.
Across these projects, I bring criminology, anthropolgy, sociolegal studies, and critical security studies into conversation. My work develops around four connected themes: risk and security governance; everyday institutional practice and professional judgment; securitization and legal ordering; and ethnographic research in security contexts.
● NOW AVAILABLE
Counter-Extremism and High Policing in Canada
Improvising Security
Drawing on seven years of embedded fieldwork, it explores how legal ambiguity, bureaucratic constraints, and racialized risk logics shape the daily work of CVE practitioners.
Routeledge, 2026
○ UPCOMING BOOK
Doing Autoethnographic and Qualitative Research in High-Security Fields
Studying Up
This book develops a practical and interdisciplinary framework for conducting qualitative research in secretive, politically charged, and institutionally closed environments.
Palgrave Macmillan, under contract
✦ FUTURE PUBLICATIONS
Feeling Security: Uncertainty and the Affective Burden of National Security Work
Co-authored with Karine Côté-Boucher
This articles explores how practitioner’s of national security mobilize feelings and emotions in the name of the state’s protection under the shadow of terrorism. It develops the concept of affective discernment to examine how national security practitioners feel their way through uncertainty and make consequential judgments about risk. It shows how professional socialization, institutional pressures, and emotional responsibility shape discretion and accountability in high policing.
Negotiating Access from Within: Practitioner–Researcher Positionality in National Security Ethnography
What happens to ethnographic access and analytic independence when the researcher becomes a professional participant in the national security field being studied? This article exmines how professional embeddedness shapes access, positionality, data production, and ethical boundaries when conducting ethnographic research inside national security institutions.
↗ CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Imagining Terror and Dangerousness
Investigates the role of imagination, futurity, and uncertainty in radicalization risk assessment.
Hybridization of National Security Practices
Builds on ethnographic findings to propose a hybrid model of high and low policing.
Meriem Rebbani, PhD 