Jacob is from Ottawa and completed his B.A. (Honours) in History at Carleton University. He is broadly interested in the relationships among state power, standardization, and the production of administrative space. Work on his undergraduate honours thesis led him to an interest in how taken-for-granted economic concepts and administrative practices become embedded in the state regulation of housing issues. The commitment of the Institute of Political Economy to interdisciplinary scholarship and debate about power in modern society drew Jacob to the M.A. program.
Jacob is currently working on a Master’s thesis, entitled “Bureaucratizing House-building in Postwar Canada: Political Geographies of the National Building Code,” which examines how state and industrial actors scaled house-building into an object of “national” surveillance through the circulation of construction standards. Jacob’s project is being supervised by Dr. Pablo Mendez in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. Jacob is also working with Dr. Mendez as a research assistant.