Over the past decade, environmental histories across the Global South have moved beyond narratives of scarcity, degradation, and exceptional crisis. This panel highlights emerging directions that foreground infrastructure, technology, water, extraction, and waste as central analytic lenses for understanding the region’s past and present.

Bringing together papers spanning geographies from Morocco and Tunisia to Palestine and India, the panel draws on technology and infrastructure studies, water history, blue humanities, discard studies, and mining history. It examines how environments are produced through pipelines, dams, aquaculture infrastructures, tailings dams, ports, and maritime routes, as well as through the afterlives of waste and resource frontiers. These contributions analyze hydraulic, mineral, maritime, and petrochemical systems as historical actors that reshape labor regimes, state power, imperial formations, and everyday life.

Collectively, the panel situates North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia within connected transregional and oceanic histories. By tracing entanglements of extraction, circulation, and disposal across land and sea, it reframes these regions as interconnected sites for rethinking infrastructure, sovereignty, and ecological transformation.