This virtual series will explore both border and infrastructure in the larger Middle East, but through a lens of Elements. 

EARTH / AIR / FIRE / WATER will frame panels across the year and allow for new ways to explore materiality, mediation, and scale that problematize how we imagine both border and infrastructure.  Thinking elementally is to think through the material continuities between border and climate crises. It will problematize not just time and space, but changing relationships of ecology, construction, and movement in the social world around us. Each elemental theme will be addressed twice over the course of the year, and each panel will bring together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners across disciplines and fields to provide insights, field-fresh research, and original interventions into critical issues that concern the Middle East but branch out far beyond.