School science and engineering challenges often involve abstractions. These abstractions may strip away complexities needed to understand broader societal and environmental implications of STEM issues, products and services. Alternatively, STEPWISE pedagogies have empowered secondary students to employ actor-network theory (ANT) mapping, blueprinting complex interactions of living, non-living and semiotic actants. STEPWISE empowers students to perform primary and secondary research and then produce science or engineering products as forms of social activism. In this way, students may come to realize how semiotics may obscure problematic science and engineering practices and innovations, such as coltan mining for cellphones. A historical background of actor-network theory (ANT) charts its development for use in analyzing science practice and its modifications for use in secondary educational contexts. Past educational implementations of ANT-mapping are compared with newer STEPWISE iterations which embed Foucault’s notion of repressive and normalizing power, as well as dispositifs, larger machine-like assemblages of actants that act with collective values and goals. Public awareness of dispositifs and complex power relationships revealed by ANT hint at new possibilities for science education, engineering, STEAM and activism. A full secondary implementation of actor-network maps including success criteria is explored with teacher recommendations.