Psychedelics in Society
and Culture
About the Program
Psychedelics in Society and Culture is an initiative jointly housed at UC Berkeley and Harvard that fosters collaboration within and between the two universities to spark innovative, creative, and interdisciplinary research.
The initiative funds projects on psychedelics by undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The grant program aims to deepen our understanding of psychedelics, their implications for the human experience, their histories, their cultural contexts and resonances, and their significance for society.
Much research on psychedelics to date has focused on their important potential for therapeutic applications. This new grant program supports collaborations at the intersections of psychedelics and humanistic inquiry rather than the clinical investigation of psychedelics.
The program’s aim is to support research into the role of psychedelics across diverse histories, cultures, and geographies. Our hope is that this grant will produce work vital to both institutions’ growing psychedelics programs as well as the burgeoning field of psychedelics as a whole.
While spotlighting lead investigators and distinguishing specific Fellows and Scholars, Flourish Trust, along with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Indigenous project participants, among others, whose efforts significantly enrich this initiative and exemplify reciprocity and community engagement.
2024 Flourish Fellows and Scholars
Beatrice De Faveri—Flourish Scholar
Beatrice De Faveri is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, specializing in Egyptology. She received both her BA and MA in Italy, in classical archaeology (University of Padua) and ancient cultures (University of Bologna) respectively. Since 2019, she has been a member of the archaeological mission to Qift of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO). Her main research interests lie in ancient Egyptian magical and funerary texts, with a special focus on the study of rituals. Her research also extends to the relationship between ancient Egyptian ritual texts and the material culture produced by the performance of ritual practices.
Her project, “Psychotropic Substances in Ancient Egypt Ritual Practices,” seeks to enhance understanding of the use of psychotropic substances in ancient Egyptian rituals. It will focus on researching the ritualistic use of the lotus flower and mandrake within the contexts of funerary, magical, and religious texts.
Charles Hirschkind—Flourish Fellow
Charles Hirschkind is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and Europe. His published books include The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia, 2006), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford, 2005), and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2020).
His Flourish Fellowship project, “Sensorium, Embodiment, and Modes of Perception: a Case Study of a Psychedelic Church” contrasts spiritual and material perceptions of psychedelic experiences within the Ayahuasca religion Santo Daime in Brazil and the U.S. It studies perceptual modes and body techniques through fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking.
Kyle Jackson—Flourish Scholar
Kyle Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the political economy and culture of the 19th-century Americas, the international engagement of the American South, and the US in the world more broadly. His dissertation project, Port of Call to Arms: New Orleans and the Greater Caribbean in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines the rise of US global power through the prism of a city that was a focal point for the emergence of US imperialism and pan-American capitalism.
Exploring the roots of psychedelic subcultures in urban Americas, his project, “Searching for Psychedelic Experiences in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” involves preliminary research in New Orleans, laying the groundwork for a broader transnational study comparing psychedelic movements across Western Hemisphere cities.
Diana Negrín—Flourish Fellow
Diana Negrín da Silva, PhD is a geographer, educator, and curator who currently teaches in the departments of Geography and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work is anchored to her lifelong dialogue between California and Jalisco, where she was raised and continues to conduct the bulk of her scholarship and teaching. Since 2003, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and San Luis Potosí with a primary focus on the social and political activism of Wixárika University students and young professionals, and the politics of race and identity construction in Mexico. Her current research examines interracial and cross-geographic alliances that mobilize around Indigenous culture and territory, with a specific focus on resource extraction and land use changes in the sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta.
Her initiative, “Psychedelic Cultures and Extractivism in Sacred Territory,” seeks to document the impact of global entheogen commodification on sacred Indigenous lands caused by agro-industrial expansion and peyote tourism with a focus on the preservation of Indigenous rights and the defense of ancestral lands against extractive practices.
Mariavittoria Mangini—Flourish Fellow
Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states. For the last fifty years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.
Her “Women’s Visionary Council: Elders’ Oral History Project” initiative, supported by the Flourish Fellowship, aims to recognize and preserve the contributions of psychedelic elders in shaping contemporary psychedelic exploration. The project involves bringing together psychedelic elders and underground guides to record oral histories and document their experiences and practices.
Poulomi Saha—Flourish Fellow
Poulomi Saha is an associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. They work at the intersections of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. Currently, they are working on “Fascination,” a book about how our cultural obsession with cults reveals what we truly hunger for and how fundamentally cults have shaped spirituality, belonging, race, and the search for higher meaning in America. Their first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal was awarded the Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Helen Tartar First Book Prize. Their work has been published in many academic and public venues, including differences, Interventions, and Signs.
This initiative, “Towards Re-enchantment: Mysticism, Psychedelics, Reimagining Critical Theory,” explores the intersections of mysticism, psychedelics, and critical theory from spiritual, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives, aiming to rejuvenate the emancipatory potential of critical theory through the lens of psychedelic experiences.
Liam McEvoy—Flourish Scholar
Liam McEvoy is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in “Middle Eastern Language & Culture” and “Race and Law.”
His project, “Unfurling the ‘Cup of Dreams’: A Blooming Investigation into the Egyptian Blue Lotus” is an inquiry into the psychoactive properties of the sacred Egyptian blue lotus (Nymphaea Caerulea, a water lily that appears extensively throughout the Egyptian Book of the Dead), as well as wellness products formulated with N. Caerulea and other species of water lily.
Darian Longmire—Flourish Fellow
Darian Longmire, an assistant professor of art practice at UC Berkeley, is a mixed-media artist whose work explores time, space, and techno culture. The Flourish Fellowship project Elastic Magazine, a publication of psychedelic art and literature, is a multidisciplinary and cross-functional collaboration between UC Berkeley and Harvard, with Hillary Brenhouse serving as editor-in-chief. This biannual print magazine will publish a diverse and expansive body of contemporary psychedelic art and writing while also paying tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic work by radically innovative artists, writers, and thinkers of color.
Patricia Kubala—Flourish Fellow
Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, Psychedelic Reckonings, is a study of how concepts of ancestry, inheritance, and intergenerational transmission animate contemporary practices of working with psychedelics and plant medicines in the U.S. Her research considers not only the promise but also the dilemmas involved in the project of laboring for a psychedelic “otherwise” — for an ethics, therapeutics, and metaphysics adequate to reckoning with planetary ecological crisis and unresolved legacies of epistemic and material colonial and settler-colonial violence.
Her project, “Psychedelic Reckonings: Ancestry, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Transmission in Contemporary Psychedelic and Plant Medicine Practices in the United States,” will explore the increasing salience of multiple figures of ancestry, inheritance and transmission, across bodies, generations, humans and more-than-human-others, the living and the dead, to psychedelic culture in the United States. The fall 2024 symposium at UC Berkeley will cover topics including encounters with ancestors and the dead; the use of plant medicines by Indigenous, Black, and Asian communities in the U.S. to heal intergenerational trauma; and cultural appropriation within White psychedelic culture. Patricia will organize the event in collaboration with Juliana Willars, an Indigenous (Maya and Coahuiltecan descendant) medical anthropologist transitioning into psychotherapy with a focus on healing intergenerational trauma. She comes from a medicine lineage and has served the community through harm reduction education, crisis care at festivals, and agitating at numerous conferences about the disparity of access to psychedelics for Indigenous peoples and other marginalized populations and their lack of inclusion in policy-making.
Sandra Pacheco—Flourish Fellow
Dr. Sandra M. Pacheco earned her PhD in psychology from UC Santa Cruz. She has spent eleven-plus years in Oaxaca, Mexico learning from and studying with Indigenous elders. Her work focuses on bridging Indigenous healing practices with Chicana, Latina, and Indigena feminisms and spiritualities, and decolonial psychology. She provides workshops for therapists, doctors, community members, and universities as they work to bridge ancestral indigenous medicine with modern practices. She is the co-founder of Curanderas sin Fronteras, a women’s healing collective that is dedicated to serving the health and well-being of underserved communities through ancestral medicine.
Guided by Indigenous elders, her project, “Sacred Medicines: Connecting the Wisdom of Indigenous Healers with Western Hearts,” plans a unique ceremonial conference to address issues of commodification, appropriation, and extractive research and to share practices and insights from ancestral and nature-based healing frameworks.
In the spirit of collectivist culture and Indigenous traditions, project collaborators include Solei Sarmiento, Francisco Lopez Rivarola, Oseas Barbarán Sánchez, and Camille MacDonald.