ORGANIZERS

Patricia Kubala
Core Organizer

I'm a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. My research interests include the anthropology of religion, psychological anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, and the anthropology of the senses.  In fieldwork-based projects in Cairo, Egypt and the San Francisco Bay Area, I study the ways that traditions are taught and transmitted in contexts marked by colonial violence and illegibility within the existing political and legal frameworks of the modern state. My dissertation, entitled The Medicine World: Psychedelics and the Hope for an Otherwise, explores the revival of interest in psychedelics in contemporary American society.

Tehseen Noorani
Core Organizer

I am an independent researcher in the final stages of a five-year postdoctoral project documenting how 'psychedelic' and ‘psychotic’ experiences, practices and histories are connected.  This has involved an ethnography of the overground and underground experimentation happening with, (1) psychedelics, including leading qualitative research with the psychedelics research team at Johns Hopkins University, and (2) madness, including as a long-standing ally of the Hearing Voices Network, and recently membership of Durham University's Hearing The Voice project. My book - planned for publication in 2021 - puts these twinned sites into conversation, locating their joint possibilities within the raced and gendered politics of contemporary drug-taking and spirit-making.

​Will Hall
​Organizer

Will Hall is a therapist schizophrenia diagnosis survivor who works with the psychiatric survivor movement. He is the author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs and Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness, and is a PhD candidate in psychiatric epidemiology at Maastricht University.

Erica Hua Fletcher
Organizer

I am a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the co-chair of the Society for Medical Anthropology's Anthropology and Mental Health Interest Group. Over the last decade, I have worked closely with community members, mental health peer support specialists, and community health workers on collaborative alternatives to traditional psychiatric treatment. I have written about mental health social movements, community mental health, carework, and the education of healthcare providers in the U.S. context, and my scholarship spans the health humanities, social medicine, medical anthropology, and Mad studies.

Kitty Sipple
Former Core Organizer (2019-2020)

Kitty Sipple is a disabled, white, queer, non-binary femme. They are deeply connected to supporting community solutions around healing justice and accessibility for the LGBTQIA+ community. From facilitating writing workshops to holding space in peer-led support groups, they are interested in the symbiotic nature of community care. They just graduated from UMN-Twin Cities where they received a BS in Engineering Studies, Holistic Health and Healing, and Plant/Fungal Biology. Kitty uses they/them pronouns.

Accessibility Support

​Rachel Jane Liebert is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of East London. Her recent book, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination, combines an experiment in public art with mad justice commitments to rearticulate the figure of the 'pre-psychotic'.


Other Conference Credit

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