James Merron & Siri Lamoureaux (2024)

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Online first, open access

Abstract. In 2017, an old satellite dish in Ghana was repurposed into a radio telescope. While highly celebrated in public, complications surrounding this conversion resulted in criticism in the African astronomy community. While ‘repurposing’ has been optimistically embraced in recent Science and Technology Studies literature, we challenge ‘repurposing’s’ seemingly natural alignment with the common good, defined here as the path towards technoscientific modernity in Ghana. Instituting a distinction between a project of ‘repurposing’ for capacity development and building a new radio observatory in South Africa for global science presupposes a difference between real ‘inspired’ science and technology that serves a ‘civic’ orientation. In postcolonial societies, we cannot speak of singular ‘orders of worth’, but inevitably multiple orientations towards technoscientific modernity and visions for the ‘common good’. We locate a converted radio telescope and its digital infrastructure within such contested visions through phases of materially inscribed ‘orders of worth’. Over time, successive ‘worths’ are materially inscribed Ghanaian ground station as a site for 1) global telecommunications, 2) capacity building, 3) satellite data transfer. We present the material politics at work between various stakeholders: astronomers, government, the private sector and residents living near the observatory.

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Valérian Geffroy, Victor Anduze Rivero & Davide Ceccato (2024)

Tourism Recreation Research, Online first, open access

Abstract. Quantification is a central instrument of tourism governance, as numbers are perceived as a solid factual basis for action. However, critical studies of quantification reveal the political, performative and constructed nature of statistics. Adopting this perspective, we offer an original methodological and conceptual framework for the analysis of tourism quantification systems. The framework includes the mapping of actors and datasets, ethnomethodological observation applied to statistical work, and discourse and controversy analysis. Such an investigation illuminates how the production of quantitative knowledge reflects and is embedded in power structures and power shifts in the tourism sector. It also allows to study quantitative observation as part of the sector’s response to contemporary challenges, such as overtourism, the rise of big data, or sustainability.

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Robert Geary Griffin & Martin Phillips (2024)

Sociologia Ruralis, Online first, open access

Abstract. Alternative food network research has referred to farm shops but rarely examined them in detail. This article argues that farm shops are not simply places of exchange but are complex, immersive, sensory-rich places of meaning and experience. These arguments are developed through a study that adopts an interpretive/embodied perspective on conventions and applies them through a multi-methods approach, incorporating autoethnography, interviews, a questionnaire and website analysis. The influence of farm shop interiors and farm context were investigated through thematic analysis. It was found that consumers desired a rustic interior aesthetic, an external ambience enabling exploration and an opportunity to escape time poverty through consumption. Farm shop owners endeavoured to provide a rich multi-sensory interactive consumption experience, encompassing both enterprise buildings and surrounding farm sites. It is argued that use of ‘farm-site’ consumption experiences distinguishes these enterprises from each other, contributes to consumer immersion and positively contributes to the collective identity of ‘farm shops’. Furthermore, the provision of retroscaped experiential consumption promises resilience from supermarket co-optation.

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