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Love in a F*cked-Up World – Dean Spade
5.23.25 – 4:30pm @ The Book Bin
Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age.
How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection?
Deconstructing Settler Socialism – Historical Seditions
5.24.25 – 3:00pm @ Corvallis Community Center
“Deconstructing Settler Socialism: The Internationals and Anarchism in the Wild West” compiles original research on the early days of anarchism, communism, etc. This book is geographically situated in the violent settler-colonial context of the 19th century “Wild West.” Some of the earliest North American sections of the First International in 1860s San Francisco feature alongside early miners unions in the Rockies and Indigenous hop-picker strikes on the Salish Sea. Exploring trans-regional connections makes clear the relevance and interconnection of events in this region to better-known histories such as the 1873 split of the International and the 1886 Haymarket uprising.
Gang Politics – Kristian Williams
5.24.25 – 4:30pm @ Corvallis Community Center
In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.
The Hands That Crafted The Bomb – Josh Fernandez
5.24.25 – 5:30pm @ Corvallis Community Center
Josh Fernandez is a community college professor in Northern California who finds himself under investigation for “soliciting students for potentially dangerous activities” after starting an antifascist club on campus.
As Fernandez spends the year defending his job, he reflects on a life lived in protest of the status quo, swept up in chaos and rage, from his childhood in Boston dealing with a mentally ill father and a new family to a move to Davis, California, where, in the basement shows of the early ’90s, Nazi boneheads proliferated the music scene, looking for heads to crack. His crew’s first attempts at an antifascist group fall short when a member dies in a knife fight.
A born antiauthoritarian, filled with an untamable rage, Fernandez rails against the system and aggressively chooses the path of most resistance. This leads to long spates of living in his car, strung out on drugs, and robbing the whiteboys coming home from the clubs at night. He eventually realizes that his rage needs an outlet and finds relief for his existential dread in the form of running. And fighting Nazis. Fernandez cobbles together a life for himself as a writing professor, a facilitator of a self-defense collective, a boots-on-the-ground participant in Antifa work, and a proud father of two children he unapologetically raises to question authority.
