The Power and Politics of Affordances

• In Event: 1555 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Artifacts and Politics

Abstract

The concept of “affordances” features prominently in communication and ICT studies. While the concept strikes a useful balance between constructivism and technological determinism, issues of politics and power remain undertheorized. Based on a chapter from my forthcoming book “How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things” (MIT Press), this presentation demonstrates how technical features entangle with power structures and political dynamics. I situate this argument within an intellectual trajectory of materialism, actor-network theory, and the notion of technology as materialized action. The argument is tied to the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances, which systematically models how artifacts afford for diverse subjects and amidst varied circumstances (Davis and Chouinard, 2016). Specifically, the mechanisms and conditions framework interrogates the conditions under which artifacts request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse and allow. This framework theorizes affordances as relational, dynamic, and necessarily structural. A politicized theory of affordances, like the mechanisms and conditions framework, is a sharp analytic tool that approaches technical design through a critical lens.

Author

• Jenny L. Davis, The Australian National University