Kristian Williams

I will be speaking in Northern California three times in the next week.

On Saturday, December 10, I’ll be speaking about Oscar Wilde’s politics at the Humboldt Anarchist Bookfair. The book fair is at the Manila Community Center, 1611 Peninsula Drive, Arcata. The talk is in Room B at 11am.

On Tuesday, December 13, I’ll give a talk on police violence. The event is at 421 Miner Street in Stockton. Food will be served at 6pm, and I’ll speak at 7pm.

Then on Wednesday, December 14, I’ll be discussing strategies for resisting police violence. The talk is at the V-Hive, 2315 K St., in Sacramento, and starts at 6:30pm.

On Wednesday, November 2, I will be speaking about counterinsurgency and domestic policing at Oberlin College in Ohio. The event, sponsored by the Prison Justice Project, begins at 8:00 in Craig Auditorium.

During a visit to the British Library a few years ago, I came across a short note from Oscar Wilde to his wife, Constance. It is actually a sweet little prose poem on the nature of love. Later, I was surprised to see that the note is not included in the Complete Letters. So I set off to figure out what it was that I had found, when it was written, and what it might mean.

The result is an essay available at The World and I.

My two latest articles both focus, in very different ways, on the position the cops occupy in our highly stratified society.

The first, “Exclusion Zones,” appears in the September issue of In These Times. It describes the policing of public space in Portland, Oregon (where I live), and outlines the race and class dynamics driving the cops’ approach. I link two deaths at the hands of police — those of James Chasse and Keaton Otis — to the agenda established by the local business elite, in particular, the Portland Business Alliance.

The second article considers the role cops played in the labor unrest in Wisconsin earlier in the year, and contrasts it to their more usual job of breaking strikes. Specifically, I try to identify the conditions under which the cops sometimes side with striking workers, and the limits to that solidarity. That article is in the September/October 2011 issue of Dollars and Sense, but isn’t available online.