Students at the CUNY Graduate Center Anthropology department are pleased to announce a conference inviting reflection on the politics, genealogies and epistemologies of ‘need.’

This conference will explore need as it is manifested in many different contexts and affixed to all kinds of discourses —from the framing of humanitarian goals and health projects, to discourses of the self and self-betterment, romantic relationships, and spirituality, to the intervention and regulation of family forms.

Conference is at 36th 5th Ave, New York, NY, in the Skylight Room on the 9th floor.

UPDATED: The program is available in PDF format

PANELS:

10.30 - 12pm:   i. the politics and economies of need

• Leah Rosa Weinberg, Architecture, Yale University: From Block to Box: How Perceived Needs Changed the Architecture of Public Housing
• Kacper Podłocki, CUNY Graduate Center: Redefining Cultural Need: Displacing Working-Class Neighborhoods and their Cultures
• Priya Lal, History, NYU: Rural Development, Security, and Welfare in Postcolonial Tanzania

12 - 1.30pm   ii. personal needs: bodies and selves

• Andrea Mueller, Sociology, Rutgers University: Service Narratives and Care Boundary Maintenance
• Amiel Melnick & Shana Lessing, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center: Psychotherapy and 'Human Potential': Typologies of Need"

2.30 - 4pm   iii. needing to need: meanings & practices

• Adam Walker, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center: What Children Need: A Semiotic Analysis of Family Politics
• Yoni Reinberg, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center: You Don't Know What It's Like... To Need Somebody
• Avi Brisman, Anthropology, Emory University: Criminal Recycling and the Need for Garbage and Trash

4:15pm   Regularly scheduled talk & reception courtesy of the CUNY Anthropology Department

EMAIL US @ needsconference@gmail.com.

Conference PDF here for distribution: In Times Of Need.

Original Conference Call for papers here: In Times Of Need CFP.

This conference is sponsored by the CUNY Department of Anthropology