Nick was a Visiting Fellow at UVic’s Centre for Global Studies / Borders in Globalization Lab in the academic year 2023–24. Building on initial research on the Danish-German borderlands, his primary research has traced the emergence of international boundaries and borders in Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley, based on three decades of ethnographic research. He is currently researching the idea of border dematerialisations – the topic of what happens when borders reopen.

In 2023, Nick conducted field research funded by BIG Lab on the impacts of border re-openings in recent years along the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan boundary. He is currently preparing this research for publication. Nick is also completing a book manuscript on the ‘open borders’ debate for McGill-Queens University Press, entitled Whatever Happened to Our Borderless World? (Forthcoming, McGill-Queens).