The conception and circulation of the notion of rural gentrification in France
Résumé
This paper is an English translation of a book chapter published in France. It focuses on the way in which the notion of rural gentrification has circulated within French geographical research. It is an integral part of the iRGENT transnational research program, which concerns the geography of both the process and the concept of rural gentrification in France, the UK and the US. One of the objectives is to better understand the application and differing uses of the term within each of the national and academic contexts. In that perspective, the “circulatory sociologies of translation” was chosen as the main analytical tool for this research (Latour, 2001). This specific component of the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) is helpful to better understand how and why a concept or term emerges, establishes itself, is contested, is used by consensus, or not, in the academic world as well as in society, and ultimately becomes a scientific reality. This approach has been adopted previously with regard to rural gentrification (Phillips 2010; Phillips et Smith 2018).
The originality of this article lies in the tools used to perform the analysis. In addition to the conventional bibliographical approach, we conducted interviews with a panel of 20 geographers and sociologists identified by their recurrent or less frequent use of the notion of rural gentrification in their own research. These interviews enabled us to learn about and understand more precisely each of their individual positions as regards rural gentrification, from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. We have thus, based on the experience of researchers directly involved in the process, been able to analyse and deconstruct the pathways and circumstances surrounding the use of the concept within French geographical research. This leads us to a few general considerations about the way in which ANT can be used to trace the emergence of scientific concepts and facts.