Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice by Tom Williams ’11.

January 14, 2026

Tags Alumni Book

(MIT Press, 2025).

An associate professor of computer science at the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab, the author argues that robotics design has historically reinforced white supremacist and patriarchal systems of power. In this book, he explores what roboticists might do to subvert rather than reinforce those trends.

Specifically, Williams examines the ways in which roboticists design their robots’ appearance, how robots think and act, how robots perceive people, and the domains into which robots are deployed. “The book highlights not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce white patriarchal power structures but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields,” the publisher notes.

Drawing on computer science; history and politics; law, criminology, and sociology; feminist, ethnic, and Black studies; literary and media studies; and social, moral, and cognitive psychology, the book connects questions of robot design with larger abolitionist movements by presenting a vision for a more socially just future of robotics.