What can be made of built and provisional global health infrastructures? How do we begin to depict and analyse the complex workings and material heterogeneity of sprawling networks of people, evidentiary systems, communication channels, and the mundane and seemingly ‘micro’-interacting components and artefacts that make-up, and are made up by, global health work? This panel thinks with and through the many questions raised by the persistence of global health infrastructures, bringing together case studies that centre their coexistence, adaptability, and fragility to challenge the “modern infrastructure ideal” (Furlong 2014). We suggest that the dispersed relations, affects, and transactions that characterize these sociotechnical systems enact and assign meaning to (racial, sexual, gender) differences that congeal infrastructures. In this, we move beyond viewing difference (e.g., non-heterosexuality or blackness) as merely fraught, socially constructed variable that facilitates interventions into health or behaviour. Instead, we consider how forms of difference are conjured, orchestrated, and sedimented within global health infrastructures. Questions pertinent to our discussions include:
How are colonial, racialized, gendered, and other tropes, stereotypes, and assumptions reshuffled and recycled in submerged, non-explicit ways in present-day global health worlds? 
How do global health infrastructures work—not only through multiple layerings of mutually reinforcing networks—but also, more dissonantly, through less-visible repurposings and co-optations that meet unacknowledged exigencies contradictory to the aims of their original architecture?
How do we understand and analyze productions and valuations of deprivation and difference—the vital substrates on which global health infrastructures materialize, animate, flourish, and come undone?   
References
Furlong, Kathryn. 2014. “STS beyond the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’: Extending theory by engaging with infrastructure challenges in the South.” Technology in Society 38:  139-147.