The Helsinki Notebooks

In June 2025, the University of Helsinki’s Locating Global Protest (LGP) project team (PI: Kasper Braskén; postdoctoral researchers: Moshumee Dewoo and Shane Little) hosted the conference “Imagining the Anti-Fascist City: Contested Geographies of Resistance and Solidarity.” 

The event brought together scholars and practitioners from around the world to explore anti-fascism as a practice rooted in urban life, highlighting how resistance to authoritarianism is inseparable from the material, social, and symbolic dynamics of cities, specifically. 

Over two days of panels, a keynote by David Featherstone, and a roundtable with Peter Cole and Minna Henriksson, participants examined cases ranging from working-class women in Soviet urban imaginaries of liberation to sonic cultures reclaiming public space in Mexico. These conversations now take shape in the edited volume of the same title: Imagining the Anti-Fascist City: Contested Geographies of Resistance and Solidarity (edited by Kasper Braskén, Moshumee Dewoo, and Shane Little), to be published with Brill in their Historical Materialism book series. 

The volume is organised along a chronological and thematic arc: 

Part I: Working-Class Solidarity and the Anti-Fascist City reads Depression-era occupations in Vancouver; socialist urban imaginaries centred on women’s emancipation; neighbourhood movements under Franco in Barcelona; street theatre at India’s urban margins; and suburban anti-fascist organising in London’s Croydon. 

Part II: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism, and the Segregated City showcases anti-apartheid resistance in Cape Town; interracial internationalism in Chicago; and Black analyses of authoritarian continuities in 1960s New York. 

Part III: Anti-Fascist Memory Struggles in the City explores commemorative debates in Bari and Poland; transnational controversies surrounding comfort-women memorials; and contested public art landscapes in Chicago. 

Part IV: Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Urbanism turns to sonic cultures reclaiming public space in Mexico; protest movements in Sri Lanka: post-Gezi contestations in Istanbul; and neighbourhood-based infrastructures responding to contemporary far-right mobilisation. 

We will share updates on the LGP project webpage as the book progresses. 

Kasper Braskén, Moshumee Dewoo, and Shane Little 

Co-editors, Imagining the Anti-Fascist City