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Abstract In dialogue with science education and learning sciences research, in this article we develop a disciplinary‐specific view on youth and community agency for community‐based technology education. Cultivating agency is a central principle in our design and empirical study of the Young People's Race, Power, and Technology Program (YPRPT), a program designed to engage youth in critical inquiry about the technologies impacting their local communities. In this article, drawing from our multiyear partnership with a community‐based youth organization, we examine how agency was supported and constrained as a function of the practices we engaged in as a research team committed to participatory and justice‐centered education. Our findings illustrate ways that the emergence and enactment of agency, at both individual and community levels, works to interrupt, subvert, and creatively “jam” systems of power. We argue that cultivating agency in community‐driven science and technology learning requires an honest reckoning with the deeply entrenched racial and economic oppression in the United States. We contend that it is equally essential to commit to learning from, co‐designing with, and working in solidarity alongside the youth and communities that are most impacted by technologies that mediate our experiences—toward unveiling, resisting, and reimagining their powerful roles in our collective lives. 

This study investigates how opportunities to learn about the ethics of advanced technologies emerged and were negotiated through interaction amongst students and instructors in YPRPT, an out of school STEM learning environment. We present a microethnographic analysis of a single pedagogical activity organized around GeoMedia, a tool we designed to mimic authentic surveillance technologies currently used by numerous law enforcement agencies. Our findings detail how the organization and unfolding of learning in the focal activity created opportunities for students to explore “under the hood” of advanced technologies, and to feel a sense of excitement and awe at the possibilities and perils of social media surveillance. Additionally, our findings show how opportunities to learn were not solely constructed through apriori pedagogical design, but also emerged through in-the-moment instructional decisions and sequences of activity. This study has implications for participatory design possibilities grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration between historically disparate disciplines like computer science and civics.