Christine Hauskeller, University of Exeter; Amelia Fiske, Technical University Munich; Osiris Sinuhé González Romero, University of Saskatchewan; Luis Eduardo Luna, Wasiwaska Research Center; Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Since their introduction into Western culture and medicine, the use of psychedelic substances has been highly controversial. At times psychedelics have been treated by governing bodies as a threat to public health, and they have been criminalized and caught up in the “war on drugs.” Since the 2000s, research on psychedelics has been revived, with hundreds of clinical trials investigating their efficacy and safety as part of therapies for addiction, depression, or end-of-life anxiety. Yet, whether biomedical investments, pharmacological practices, non-clinical use contexts, or forms of psychedelic tourism, the medico-pharmacological industrial complex around psychedelics is also generating and reinforcing colonizing oppressions. The psychedelic revival generates conflict over access and biomedical hegemony in the Global North as well as struggles about ownership of Indigenous knowledges, and proprietary colonial uses of biodiversity and territory in the Global South.
In this panel, we seek to bring together scholars who research psychedelics-related matters and contemporary decolonizing methodologies. We aim to discuss whether and how it is possible to decolonize the psychedelic research revival. We invite contributions that engage with:
ethical, metaphysical, psycho-social, and political-economic facets of the research and broader cultural revival of psychedelics;
critiques of cultural appropriation and biopiracy;
phenomenology, philosophy, and cultural embedding of psychedelic practices;
colonial histories that shape psychedelic research and use in the Global North;
transformations of Indigenous practices as psychedelic substances move into clinical settings;
power struggles over legitimacy and cognitive liberty;
self-reflexive explorations of decolonizing methods in STS.
