Ten years of Psychedemia — and the future

Abstract

I participated in Psychedemia 2012 as an attendee and Psychedemia 2022 as a speaker.The first was a formative experience: I was twenty-three years old and had never been to a scholarly meeting before that weekend.Six months later, a classmate would tell me that the main point of conferences was to inflate scholars' egos.We were in our first year of grad school, and I was beginning to realize that academia consists of much more than the production of knowledge.It's a culture as much as it is a vocation; it gives its members an identity so complete that some can hardly imagine a different way of life.Now that I'm fully initiated, I'd revise my classmate's observation: conferences are where academics go to have their self-image validated.This also happens on college campuses, but campuses are mostly for students, and in general students see college as an exception to the norms of adult life.By contrast, academic conferences amplify and exalt the weirdness of the scholarly lifestyle.They share one essential feature: within their bounds, the institutionalization of knowledge is considered life-affirming.From this perspective, Psychedemia 2012 was both normal and bizarre.Its superficial trappings exemplified what I'd later recognize as the Academic Conference Experience.Panels prompted affirmation and dispute from audiences; conversation between strangers was easy and spontaneous; and I had strong FOMO (i.e., fear of missing out), since the schedule forced a choice between different events.I went with a friend who was also unfamiliar with conferences, and the word "overwhelming" came up a lot in conversation.Another became an internal refrain: "surreal."There was a palpable sense of unreality about the whole thing.Some of that was due to optics: the conference's slogan -"integrating psychedelics into academia"was reflected in participants' attire, which was equal parts Ivy League and Burning Man.But the mood was mostly determined by the simple fact of the event's existence.It felt as if Psychedemia was pulling off something that was technically impossible: psychedelic academia.In hindsight, I think we were playing a prank on the nature of institutionalized knowledge.That the academy itself would produce such a prank struck me as absurd at the time.It still does; if anything, the feeling has only grown.Recently, educators have been subject to heightened scrutiny over concerns regarding their political bias and the need to preserve "traditional" values in education (Those who promote such values are generally vague about what "traditional" means).With this in mind, the Psychedemia project seems all the more bold.It not only embraces a stigmatized topic, but does so from vantage points long considered marginal by the academy.For example, both the 2012 and 2022 meetings were proudly interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars across STEM; the social sciences; and the arts and humanities.In her 2012 presentation, Nes ¸e Devenot (nee Senol) (Devenot, 2012, September).addressed the role of humanities scholarship in the psychedelic renaissance, and the conference featured a dedicated psychedelic art exhibition (Knight, 2012).To this day, however, the psychedelic humanities remains underdeveloped.Meanwhile, interdisciplinarity casts doubt on established traditions in methodology and pedagogy.In particular, "soft" approaches to "hard science" subjects (e.g., the effects of psychoactive substances) raises eyebrows among the more intellectually conservative.Psychedemia's premisethat psychedelic studies should not only exist but take an eclectic routebroke the mold in more ways than one.There's a poetic symmetry here.Psychedelic experiences are often said to reveal life's absurdities.Their bearers often describe a reckoning with contradictions that erode truth