“What is made available to you by the environment in which you are placed.
For agency to be meaningful, in any given context, agents (or actants) must be afforded opportunities for action. In this ecological framing, affordances become “ways to carry on [one’s] life” or “the ways in which things come into the immediate presence of perceivers, not as objects-in-themselves, closed in and contained, but in their potential for the continuation of a form of life.” 1
In today’s ecological psychology, discussion of affordances typically retains Eleanor J Gibson’s and James J Gibson’s framings of these opportunities for action as neither “out there” and objective (specifiable independently of constraints associated with specific agents/actants), nor internal and subjective (specifiable only within the constraints of forms-of-life which shape perception).
Within today’s Anthro-complexity, practitioners are more likely to discuss an affordance landscape. This might have been mapped topographically as a basis for prioritising interventions to shape the dispositions which might lead actors (actants) to favour one set of affordances over another as they “wait on the world for emergent opportunities to progress forward”.”