CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
This page reflects the behind-the-scenes labor in making the conference happen. It was last updated while the conference was underway, from January-May 2021.
Organizing Team
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Erica Hua FletcherInvolved: September 2020 - May 2021
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. |
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Patricia KubalaInvolved: 2018 - May 2021
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. |
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Tehseen NooraniInvolved: 2018 - May 2021
I'm 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 more recent membership of the Hearing The Voice project. My book - planned for publication in 2022 - puts these twinned sites into conversation, locating their joint possibilities within the raced and gendered politics of contemporary drug-taking and spirit-making. |
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Kitty SippleInvolved: October 2019 - August 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. |
Working Group
A Working Group of activists and researchers engaged in decolonizing and decriminalizing movements and bringing embodied expertise as BIPOC, neurodivergent, queer, disabled, trans, non-binary and/or trauma survivors. The Working Group is advising the organizing team, and members include Nadia Book, Stephanie Davis, Ellis J. Johnson, Rachel Jane Liebert and Sab Xew.
A Working Group of activists and researchers engaged in decolonizing and decriminalizing movements and bringing embodied expertise as BIPOC, neurodivergent, queer, disabled, trans, non-binary and/or trauma survivors. The Working Group is advising the organizing team, and members include Nadia Book, Stephanie Davis, Ellis J. Johnson, Rachel Jane Liebert and Sab Xew.
Accessibility Support
Jacqueline Owusu is a graduate form the Clinical and Community Psychology Programme from the School of Psychology at the University of East London. Her final year work was entitled "An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Second-generation Migrants Living in the UK at Present". Her studies alongside her personal lived experiences have function as a springboard for her growing interest in anti-racist research and in the lived accounts of belonging and psychosis.
Lalita Devi is a psychiatric survivor with over ten years' experience supporting individuals with psychological and emotional problems, including those with severe and enduring mental illness. She has worked extensively with psychedelics as a therapeutic tool, and is interested in the burgeoning alliance between psychiatric and psychedelic research. She holds an MA in Medical Anthropology from SOAS, University of London.
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'.
Jacqueline Owusu is a graduate form the Clinical and Community Psychology Programme from the School of Psychology at the University of East London. Her final year work was entitled "An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Second-generation Migrants Living in the UK at Present". Her studies alongside her personal lived experiences have function as a springboard for her growing interest in anti-racist research and in the lived accounts of belonging and psychosis.
Lalita Devi is a psychiatric survivor with over ten years' experience supporting individuals with psychological and emotional problems, including those with severe and enduring mental illness. She has worked extensively with psychedelics as a therapeutic tool, and is interested in the burgeoning alliance between psychiatric and psychedelic research. She holds an MA in Medical Anthropology from SOAS, University of London.
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
Dina Tyler, James Norwood, Nita Gage and Tara Samiy were involved in the early visioning of this conference.
Koyote de Mar designed the conference logo.
Liviane Urquiza has provided website design support.
Will Hall was involved in early visioning of this conference and formerly was an organizer.
Dina Tyler, James Norwood, Nita Gage and Tara Samiy were involved in the early visioning of this conference.
Koyote de Mar designed the conference logo.
Liviane Urquiza has provided website design support.
Will Hall was involved in early visioning of this conference and formerly was an organizer.