Faculty Directory

William R. Frey is a scholar, writer, and dialogic facilitator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is currently a Joint Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Information and the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, and teaches as Part-Time Faculty in the School of Social Work at Boston College. William co-organizes the Critical Race and Intersectional Technology (CRIT) Collective with Kishonna L. Gray—an intergenerational, creative, and intellectual community of care.

William’s research aims to complicate how we think about race and sociocultural technologies, and the ways people navigate the structuring, maintenance, and disruption of digital norms, relationships, and boundaries. Broadly, his scholarship is interested in the pathways to and architectures for healthy community between people within and across sociopolitical fractures with a specific focus on digital contexts. William’s research is fundamentally transdisciplinary to study across and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, drawing from sociology, critical race studies, digital studies, psychology, communication, whiteness studies, social work, platform studies, and many other spaces of intellectual and creative work. His research can be found in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Social Science Computer Review, Advances in Social Work, Data & Society, and elsewhere.

Trained in inter-/intragroup dialogic pedagogy as a teenager at the Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan, William’s research is informed by over 15 years of group facilitation in conversation with people about race, racism, and whiteness. From 2019 to 2022, he organized and facilitated the Space for Uprooting Whiteness, a weekly space of people committed to confronting and divesting from relationships to whiteness (white supremacy and domination), which met over 125 times over three years. William’s scholarship aims to create connective tissue between research (conceptual, theoretical, and empirical) and spaces of practice and everyday life.

William holds a Ph.D. in social work from Columbia University and an M.S.W. in community organization and B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he serves as Resident Tutor in Adams House at Harvard with his wife, Kemeyawi, and their Italian Greyhound, Karl Marx.