Profile picture for user awlliams@spencer.org

Anthony James Williams

Associate Program Officer and Project Manager, Spencer Foundation
Chapter Member: Chicagoland SSN
Areas of Expertise:

Connect with Anthony

About Anthony

Williams' research focuses on how race; gender; sexuality affect experiences of incarceration and shape social movements. Overarching themes in Williams' writings include public space; resistance; and marginalization more broadly. Williams' previous service work includes co-director of UCLA's Justice Work Group; co-coordinator of the UCLA Race and Ethnicity Working Group; volunteering inside juvenile facilities with Inside OUTWriters; and volunteering inside San Quentin.

In the News

Quoted by in "On Instagram, Black Squares Overtook Activist Hashtags," Wired, June 2, 2020.
Opinion: "Only Fags Bottom: Recreating Toxic Masculinities in Queer Communities," Anthony James Williams, Masculinities 101, August 31, 2018.
Opinion: "Who Teaches Academics to Theorize?," Anthony James Williams, Inside Higher Ed, June 15, 2018.
Quoted by Jaleesa M. Jones in "#BlackWomenDidThat Remembers the Black Women Who Have Helped Crack the Glass Ceiling," USA Today, July 29, 2016.
Opinion: "Divestment from Private Prisons and Fossil Fuels Can Work," Anthony James Williams (with Ron Dellums and Silver Hannon), The Hill, April 21, 2016.
Opinion: "Why I Started Tweeting and Helped Popularise #MasculinitySoFragile," Anthony James Williams, Independent, September 27, 2015.
Quoted by Dexter Thomas in "Why is #MasculinitySoFragile?," Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2015.

Publications

"Us Versus Them: How California State Prisons Justify Solitary Confinement", University of California, Los Angeles, June 2023.

Details the dangerous consequences of the discretionary power that California state prison staff wield over incarcerated people through the use and threat of solitary confinement.

"The Need for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Criminal (in)Justice" Symbolic Interaction 44 (2021): 861-864.

Book review of "Security and Risk Technologies in Criminal Justice" (2019) that argues for the need to include interdisciplinary approaches to the study of criminal (in)justice.

"Wayward in Sociology?" Contexts 19, no. 4 (2020): 82-83.

Book essay of Saidiya Hartman's "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" that problematizes how sociologists discuss Blackness and deviance.

"The Road to Private Prison Divestment" Boom: A Journal of California 6, no. 2 (2016).

Discusses the Afrikan Black Coalition and their efforts to divest from private prisons.

"South African Healthcare: Utopian Dream or Failed Reality?" Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal (2015).

Argues, based on the Peoples' Health Charter,  that the National Health Insurance alone is not enough to fix health disparities in South Africa if the commodifications of healthcare and the alienation of rural and unpaid healthcare workers is not first addressed.