The need to transition, the need to migrate, the need to code switch: what is the relationship between material and psychic need? How does the former map–or fail or refuse to map–onto the latter and with what effects? If political impulses towards isolationism construe migration and gender transition as an incursion or a threat, how can we understand the need to trespass as a social, rather than threatening, one? Construing border-crossing as a question either of cosmopolitan expectations of access or as a material necessity motivated by persecution fails to account for a non-entitled, non-hostile, and non-exigent need to trespass the boundaries of an other (e.g. a State). Using a language of rights to describe the intervening space of decision and its relation to sociality misses the way that this kind of need is both socially coerced and relationally generative.

At a moment of accelerating violence against needs that have been made grounds for political persecution as well as liberal projects such as the provisional granting of asylum, how does need show the ways in which social breakdown signifies psychically? And when psychic breakdown becomes inextricable from the social, what new needs emerge?

This panel invites interrogations of the way that “need” has functioned with and against the logic of problem-solving. What “problems,” for example, does the migrant who migrates or the trans person who transitions solve, not for themselves, but for the categories and discourses that reflect on them? Drawing on psychoanalysis, trans studies, Global South Studies, diasporic and im/migration studies, de- and anti-colonialism, and more, we seek approaches that offer new methods of conceptualizing the relationship between psychic, social, and material need.