Community, credibility, and care: Activist public relations in the Portuguese psychedelic field

Activist public relations within a Portugal-based node of the contemporary psychedelic movement operates through a hybrid choreography that coordinates pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event afterlives. This choreography is sustained through temporal anchoring—cadence, cycles, and annual anchors—and narrative care informed by an ethics of care, including privacy safeguards, harm-reduction framing, and a deliberately non-promotional tone. Place-framing and selective partnerships root claims in Portuguese publics and enable adjacent legitimacy while maintaining clear boundaries against treatment provision. The work specifies how place-based community infrastructure is sustained through hybrid and temporal repertoires, and shows how care-oriented curation can widen credible voice while bounding exposure so that testimony functions as public reason rather than spectacle.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article theorises how activist public relations operates within a Portugal-based node of the contemporary psychedelic movement. Drawing on agonistic and critical public relations, legitimacy is approached as a situated and contested accomplishment through which credibility and epistemic authority are negotiated in practice. Using a qualitative single-case design, the study analyses a comprehensive website corpus ( N = 313) and four role-central interviews. Findings demonstrate a hybrid choreography that coordinates pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event afterlives. This choreography is sustained through temporal anchoring (cadence, cycles, annual anchors) and narrative care informed by ethics of care, including privacy safeguards, harm-reduction framing, and a deliberately non-promotional tone. Place-framing and selective partnerships further root claims in Portuguese publics and enable adjacent legitimacy while maintaining clear boundaries against treatment provision. The article contributes by specifying how place-based community infrastructure is sustained through hybrid and temporal repertoires, and by showing how care-oriented curation can widen credible voice while bounding exposure so that testimony functions as public reason rather than spectacle. Practically, the findings suggest designing communication as a sequenced arc from outreach and reminders to convening and documentation, followed by resource-oriented recaps, supported by predictable rhythms and explicit privacy and harm-reduction protocols.