Guest speaker: Andrea Ens, Purdue University. This presentation outlines Canadian and American practitioners’ use of LSD, mescaline, and peyote in psychedelic conversion therapies during the postwar period. Such programs in both countries drew from widespread psychiatric faith in psychoanalysis and pharmacology in changing patient behavior, as well as shared Cold War-era cultural anxieties about sex, gender, and national security that negatively associated same-gender attraction with Communism, criminality, and psychopathy.

Guest speaker: Joanna Kempner, Rutgers University. Federal regulations mandate that investigators limit their clinical trials to pre-approved, standardized drugs to assure reliable results. Sometimes, however, unauthorized investigators) develop therapeutic protocols for the use of drugs in the underground, beyond the reach of federal regulators. This presentation investigates how unauthorized investigators engaged in “collective experimentation” standardize drugs given the difficulty of obtaining “laboratory-grade” pharmaceuticals by drawing on a case study of Clusterbusters.

Guest speaker: Ramzi Fawaz, PhD, Assistant Professor of English, UW-Madison. In this talk, Dr. Fawaz argues for the value of psychedelic experience as a framework for amplifying the social and political impacts of literature on the affective lives of readers and viewers.

Guest speakers: Nese Devenot, University of Cincinnati, and Brian Pace, The Ohio State University

Guest speaker: Evgenia Fotiou, Independent Scholar. In recent years, there have been calls to “decolonize” the academy as well as the field of psychedelic science. This lecture will reflect on potential contributions from anthropology to these conversations. Dr. Fotiou will address the question of what psychedelic science can learn from Indigenous Knowledges and how we can get closer to including Indigenous peoples as equal partners to scientific inquiry.