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- Degrees of Freedom Update 8: Kind Words
Degrees of Freedom Update 8: Kind Words
Revealing the first reviews (Advance Praise) for Degrees of Freedom.
Tom Williams
September 16, 2025
Hi friend,
We’ve got blurbs!
In today’s (short!) newsletter, I’ll share these early reviews. |  |
What are people saying about Degrees of Freedom?
I’m absolutely thrilled that MIT Press has released two blurbs for Degrees of Freedom, which represent the first reviews the book has received!
The first blurb is from Ericka Johnson, who is a Professor of Gender and Society at Linköping University, Sweden. Ericka is a co-author on the amazing 2023 HRI paper on Feminist Human-Robot Interaction. Ericka also gave a fantastic keynote address at that same conference. I was very grateful to Ericka for highlighting in her keynote my work on robots and race (which serves as the basis for one of the chapters of this book) and I’m so grateful for her kind words about the book itself.
“Working from within the belly of the beast, Williams offers insights from the humanities and social sciences, especially critical social theory, to imagine an equitable robotic future. True to an engineering ethos of ‘doing better,’ this book both explores the foundational aspects of power that invisibly shape robot design and suggests how to build robots better suited for advancing social justice.”
The second blurb is from Nicki Washington, who is the Cue Family Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University. Nicki is the co-founder of the Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows Program (of which I was in the first cohort), and the Alliance for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Computing Education (AiiCE) (of which I am a member). The 3C program provided me with the training to teach my first course on Race and Computing, and ultimately had a powerful influence on my decision to write Degrees of Freedom. As such, I’m incredibly grateful to Nicki for her kind words about the book, as it absolutely would not have existed without her leadership and mentorship.
“Degrees of Freedom is a perfect example of how transgressing the boundaries of hegemonic computing epistemologies better informs our collective understanding of not only how societal oppressions are replicated or exacerbated by robotics but also why the eradication of these harms is necessary and possible for a more just society. It’s this transgression that makes this book a must-read for scholars, professionals, students, and activists whose work creates, examines, or uses robots.”
These early reviews are so exciting to receive as we’re now less than three months from release!
Remind me, where can I pre-order Degrees of Freedom?
Source | Ebook | When? | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
$90 | NA | NA | Any time | |
$75.00 | NA | $0 | This Fall | |
$75.00 | $51.99 | NA | Any time |
While the special pre-order sale is now over, Degrees of Freedom is still available for pre-order on websites like Bookshop.org, The MIT Press Bookstore ($75), Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. As a reminder, while I’d love for you to pre-order a physical copy of the book, once the book is published the PDF version will be available FOR FREE on the MIT Press website. Once the link to the Open Access version is up online, I'll share it in this newsletter.
Thanks for reading,
Tom
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For more information on Tom Williams, visit his personal website at tomwilliams.phd
For more information on Tom’s lab, visit MIRRORLab.mines.edu