Camilla Falanesca is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose work explores the intersections of political ecology, memory, and infrastructure in the Mediterranean. Her main project, Toxic Memories: Waste as Archive at El Borma, Tunisia, examines the history of El Borma, a waste lake produced since the 1960s through the oil explosion in the desert under the Italian company ENI. Her research bridges political ecology, environmental history, and critical archival studies, combining ethnographic and digital methodologies to recount how communities living amid extractive environments remember, narrate, and negotiate their pasts. She explores how memory through environmental transformation, and how people’s ways of remembering are simultaneously cognitive and material, unfolding through landscapes, bodies, and the temporalities of extraction.
