Short Abstract

This panel explores how digital affordances are given meaning in a polarising world, shaping connection and exclusion. We invite ethnographic studies on how technologies co-construct digital socialities.

Long Abstract

Originating in Gibson’s ecological psychology, the concept of affordance denotes possibilities for action emerging in relation between actor and environment. Digital anthropologists (among others Boellstorff 2008, Miller and Horst 2012, Gershon 2017, Bucher and Helmond 2018, de Seta 2020, Seaver 2022) have extended this notion to interrogate how technological design and social practice co-produce possibilities and constraints of digital life. Recent debates highlight that affordances are not static properties but relational effects – enacted, negotiated, and contested within specific socio-cultural worlds. The “like” button affords moral positioning; affordances are learned through practice; algorithmic recommendation is continuously enacted through the daily work of engineers, data scientists, and users.

This panel asks what it means to think with affordances in a world of intensifying polarisation. If affordances are at once possibilities and constraints, how might they illuminate the (dis)assembling of digital socialities? Digital platforms afford spaces for visibility and belonging, while also amplifying fragmentation and exclusion. For instance, social VR environments may enable self-expression for LGBTQ+ users, yet accessibility remains uneven, shaped by infrastructural asymmetries, corporate interests, and global inequalities. Similarly, (trans)national interventions (such as emerging AI regulations) reflect and reinforce ideological and economic divides.

We invite original ethnographically grounded contributions that examine how digital affordances are enacted, experienced, and given meaning. What relationalities do they open or foreclose, and how are they co-constructed? Can the notion of affordance adequately capture the ambivalent possibilities of digital mediation today? What are alternatives? How can anthropologists situate affordances within a polarising world without reproducing binaries?

Propose paper