ABSTRACT
How can young people make use of digital tools and methods to get to grips with the risks and dilemmas arising out of contemporary science, technology and society relations? This chapter addresses the forms of agency enabled through a set of techniques for exploring and visualizing controversial technoscientific issues on the web. Given the particular orientation of these techniques, the empirical focus is on tensions and disruptions they give rise to in educational practice as they are appropriated by students in a Swedish upper secondary school context. Designed to aid the visual representation of complex processes of issue formation, the mapping tools worked against the primary inclination of teachers and students to conceive of them as aids for sorting issues out by demarcating more reliable sources of information from less reliable ones. However, extending such goals, the controversy maps students produced invited discussion and engagement with unresolved issues still-in-the-making as well the performative role of mediating technologies in enacting these issues. In this way they provided opportunities for more open forms of classroom deliberation and critical engagement consistent with Dewey’s vision of the vital role of education in democratic societies.
