2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

From Actuators to Action: Deriving Key Principles and Strategies for Social Justice Grounded Robotics Education

The purpose of this critical theory paper is to analyze and synthesize important and relevant prior frameworks, including Engineering for Social justice, feminist Human-Robot Interaction, Matrix-Guided Technology Power Analysis and Critical Race Pedagogy, to inform social-justice centered Robotics curricula.
As Robotics garners increasing research and industry interest, and as robotic technology is increasingly deployed in ethically fraught domains such as healthcare and education, it is necessary to train roboticists to develop justice-oriented agents that help remediate rather than exacerbate disparities. Unfortunately, opportunities to develop justice-oriented robotics praxis are severely limited.
Indeed, current training resources and tools are insufficient in aiding such development, as socially just robotics curricula need to prepare students to collaborate with communities, challenge dominant perspectives in robotics, and examine how racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of power that shape robotic technology. More broadly, such training must also prepare students to critically engage with societal topics such as labor, identity, and power.
While existing computing ethics frameworks can guide analysis of algorithms and software, robotics students additionally need to develop the necessary skills and competency to approach and evaluate robots as embodied technology. Thus, in this work, we synthesize and analyze the insights from leading frameworks in critical tech teaching and design.
We argue that such curricula must incorporate key principles in robot design, facilitate considerations of various stakeholders, encourage students to engage with larger social, socio-technical systems and power dynamics. We further provide relevant strategies for educators to consult, such as community-oriented ethics analysis and speculative exercises, which we also translate into learning objectives. Finally, we introduce the implications of our specific research process for other researchers and educators, share perspectives on the current state of robotics education, and describe planned future work.

Authors

Yifei Zhu Colorado School of Mines [biography]

I'm a PhD candidate in robotics at the Colorado School of Mines. I have an interdisciplinary focus on human–robot interaction, where I use mixed-methods approaches to design robot interaction and communication. I also study how emerging technologies such as robots are designed, deployed, and understood within broader social contexts.
Dr. Juan C. Lucena Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Juan Lucena is Professor and Director of Humanitarian Engineering Undergraduate Programs at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). Juan obtained a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech and a MS in STS and BS in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering fro
Dr. Tom Williams Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, Director of the MIRRORLab, and author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (2025).

Tom earned joint PhDs in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University, and is an internationally recognized scholar of Human-Robot Interaction whose work examines cognitive, social, and moral dimensions of Human-Robot Interaction.

Tom is the winner of Early Career awards from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and NASA.
Dr. Alison J Kerr Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Alison J. Kerr has a doctoral degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The University of Tulsa. Dr. Kerr's research interests include training development and evaluation as explored across a variety of academic disciplines and organizational se
Dr. Katie Winkle Uppsala University [biography]

Katie Winkle is an assistant professor at the Department for Information Technology at Uppsala University. She previously held a Digital Futures postdoctoral fellowship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and completed her PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research sits at the intersection of robotics, design, and the social sciences to tackle technical and societal challenges relating to human-machine interaction. Her award-winning work on feminist human-robot interaction has gained significant attention within the field and is helping to define new, critical directions of research on the design of robots and their interaction behaviours.
Tiera Tanksley University of California, Los Angeles [biography]

Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher in education and information studies at UCLA’s Center for Resilience and Digital Justice. Her scholarship, which theorizes a critical race technology theory (CRTT) in education, extends conventional education research to include socio-technical and techno-structural analyses of AI and EdTech. Specifically, her research examines anti-Blackness as “the default setting” and “organizing logic” of both schools and school-based technologies, and analyzes the socio-emotional, mental health and academic ramifications of algorithmic racism in the lives and schooling experiences of Black youth. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with digital technologies that they encounter both within and beyond the classroom context.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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