Moving attention from macro level transformations and focusing instead on “politics from below”, the conference interrogated the SWANA revolutions and uprisings from the perspective of their makers, looking closely at how revolutionary dynamics unfold at the micro-level and in their everyday lives. It heeded the trajectories of politicisation of activists and participants and the ways in which these revolutionary uprisings affected their lives. While the personal, subjective and affective dimensions of these eventful moments are sporadically addressed in social movements analyses, in “SWANA from below” there has been the wish to bring them to the fore.

cocultre, in the figure of Khaled Barakeh, discussed with scholars, researchers, activists, and artists concerned with the SWANA region and reflected on these themes by joining the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. coculture participated in the Panel 3, under the title "Subversive Art: Embodying and Narrating Revolutionary Legacies". The conference panels and workshops were held in cooperation with the DRafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean Project (DREAM), based at the Marc Bloch Zentrum in Humboldt University in Berlin, and Center for Social Movements Studies (COSMOS) at the Scuola Normale Superiore.