The anti-fascist urban experience is traditionally depicted through the lens of symbolic spatial politics and confrontational tactics: marches, demonstrations, street battles, anarchist-inspired movements, and anti-fascist block tactics. These are aimed at challenging fascist territorial claims in cities, often resulting in the creation of “temporary autonomous zones” and the denial of the possibility for fascists to engage with the broader public, epitomised by the slogan “They shall not pass”. However, this depiction captures only a fragment of the anti-fascist urban experience.
This conference invites contributions that challenge and expand the traditional understanding of the anti-fascist urban experience, approaching the city itself as a multilayered space of resistance, solidarity, and community-building that evolves along the constant interplay of past struggles, present actions, and a collective projection of an imagined anti-fascist urban future. It asks: How have anti-fascists envisioned and practiced the liberation of urban communities from fascism, racism, sexism, patriarchal values, and structural oppression in both the global North and the global South during the past century (1919–today)? How have they sustained solidarity across diverse and intersecting struggles while grappling with the challenges posed by gentrification, social atomisation, neoliberal urban planning, and intensified policing?
Also of interest are contributions on anti-fascist resistance to eco-fascism in the urban setting, particularly from decolonial, Indigenous, and environmental perspectives. How have anti-fascists understood their relationship with and responsibility to the non-human life forms that also exist in the urban space? How has the dichotomy between “rural” and “urban” reinforced colonial understandings of civilisation? How do we understand the anti-fascist city in the context of sustaining life?
We encourage submissions that explore any geographical area, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Subject Fields / Keywords: Urban history, left-politics, anti-fascism, memory, solidarity, resistance
Paper proposals must include:
Please submit your proposal to lgp.helsinki@gmail.com.
Important deadlines and dates:
We encourage researchers to seek funding through their respective institutions. We are currently applying for funds to offer partial financial support for travel costs.
Selected papers from the conference will be considered for publication in a peer reviewed journal special issue on the anti-fascist city. Further details regarding the publication process will be announced later.
This conference is organised by the research project “Locating Global Protest against the Extreme Right: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism and Internationalism in Multiethnic Metropoles” (LGP), funded by the Research Council of Finland (project No. 355478), University of Helsinki, Finland.