Kristian Williams

I’ll be giving presentations at two conferences this month, both in Portland.

The first is the Counter-Counterinsurgency Convergence at Reed College, April 8-10. I’ll be giving a presentation with Will Munger at 9am, Saturday the 9th. I’ll be discussing the adoption and development of counterinsurgency techniques by domestic police, and Will will present a case study based on his field work in Salinas, California. For details on the conference, visit: http://countercoin.wordpress.com/convergence-schedule/

The next weekend, April 15-17, I’ll be speaking at the Law and Disorder conference at Portland State University. I’ll give a talk called “Police Accountability and Police Abolition: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Strategies.” In the first half of the session, I will consider the sometimes thorny relationship between the police accountability perspective and the police abolition perspective, outlining the fundamental differences in their assumptions and goals, and considering the possibility for cooperation on short-term campaigns. The second half of the session will be opened up for audience discussion, and I’ll ask the participants to reflect on their own experiences in pursuing demands for accountability or organizing toward abolition. The talk is presently scheduled at 10:30 am on Saturday April 16, but check the website for any updates: http://lawandisorder.wordpress.com/about/

The past few years I’ve been working here and there on a book about Oscar Wilde and anarchism. As I don’t have a publisher — and therefore also, don’t have a deadline or an advance — my output has mostly taken the form of short pieces that I can publish in article form now and (I hope) somehow fit together later to create a complete whole.

My two most recent installments are:

“The Soul of Man Under. . . Anarchism?” New Politics. Winter 2011.

and

“The Anarchist Aphorist: Wilde and Gottesman, Paradox and Subversion.” Anarchist Studies. 2010.

The first is an examination of the few times that Wilde described himself as an anarchist, compared to his more common use of the socialist label.

The second is a comparison of Wilde’s aphorisms and some others published in Mother Earth, with attention to the use of paradox to create subversive meanings. (It’s not on the web; sorry.)

In relation to this Wilde project, I’ve also written:

“Why Does Your Lily Droop?” OutSmart. August 2010. (A review of Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews.)

“Pictures of Dorian Gray, Images of Oscar Wilde.” The Comics Journal. May 2010. (A nine-part series on Wilde’s depiction in, influence on, and relationship to cartooning.)

“The Roots of Wilde’s Socialist Soul: Ibsen and Shaw, or Morris and Crane.” The Oscholars. Spring 2010. (An investigation into the inspiration for “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”)

“Dorian Gray and the Moral Imagination.” The Common Review. Winter 2010. (A critical study of the ethical perspective of The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

“Reading Oscar’s Books.” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. 2010. (A review.)

and

“‘A Criminal with a Noble Face’: Oscar Wilde’s Encounters with the Victorian Gaol.” 2009. (A thorough look at Wilde’s prison writing, and his anti-prison writing.)

This last one was written thanks in part to a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Thanks are also owed to the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for its support.

This month I have two articles out about policing.

The first, appearing in Against the Current, is an examination of policing and violence — both the violence cops face and the violence they use. I look at the narratives we build around particular instances of violence, the ways they serve to legitimize or delegitimize the use of force, and the emerging crisis in policing. My article focuses especially on the West Coast states, but since it came out there’s been a nationwide spike in attacks on the police.

The second is a review of three books, one about the criminal justice system and two about marriage. (They are: Queer (In)Justice by Joey L. Mogul, et al.; Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff; and the anthology Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage.) In the review, I compare two elements of the mainstream gay rights agenda — appeals for police protection and the demand for marriage rights — and point to the queer critiques of these demands and the institutions involved. The review is in the February issue of In These Times.

I’ve written a lot about war the past couple months — war and comics.

The most involved is a six-part series for The Comics Journal on Garth Ennis’s stories of ariel combat.

Also for The Comics Journal, I wrote a review of the latest installment of Weird War Tales.

Doonesbury turned forty a couple months ago. Garry Trudeau put out a retrospective collection. And I wrote an essay about it for The World and I. (It’s online, but you have to have a subscription to see it. Sorry.) The essay it not only, or even mainly, about war; but it does talk quite a bit about the ways that Trudeau’s depiction of war has changed, and the ways that the experience of war changed the character B.D.

And finally: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review reprinted my four-part series on the Spanish Civil War in Comics. ASR isn’t online, but the original is at The Comics Journal. The new version is shorter, but it has a stronger conclusion.