A Conversation with Laura Dev and Bia Labate
Wednesday, November 10th from 12:00-1:30pm PST
Join Chacruna for our upcoming Community Forum featuring political ecology researcher Dr. Laura Dev, PhD in conversation with Chacruna’s Executive Director Dr. Bia Labate, PhD. Together, they will discuss Shipibo practices of dieting plants, interspecies communication, and how plant-human communication can be used to guide collaborations with plants in the research context and beyond. We will learn more about Dr. Laura Dev’s personal experiences with dieting plants, discuss possible openings toward decolonizing ayahuasca practices and research, including ways that outsiders can engage with ayahuasca healing practices that are guided by reciprocity and relationship with Indigenous communities and Peoples. Finally, we will touch on lessons that psychedelic therapists can learn from Amazonian medicine practices. This is sure to be a fascinating conversation that will explore how connecting with plant spirits can transform our own understandings of ourselves as humans beyond typical western conceptions of nature and culture.
Laura Dev is a postdoctoral scholar in political ecology at the University of California, Merced. Her research is primarily based in the Amazon and spans topics including Indigenous forestry, climate justice, interspecies relations, and illicit crops. She is currently writing a book on the political ecology of the ayahuasca boom based on her dissertation research in Shipibo communities in the Peruvian Amazon. The book tracks both plant-human relations and Shipibo-outsider relations as plants, rituals, and knowledge associated with the use of ayahuasca are recontextualized for consumers in the Global North. She holds a PhD in Society and Environment from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS in Ecology from Colorado State University. In January, 2022 she will begin a position as Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences and Society at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Website. Twitter. Contact.
Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (https://chacruna.net, https://chacruna-iri.org, https://chacruna-la.org). She serves as Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is also Diversity, Culture, and Ethics Advisor at the Synthesis Institute. Additionally, she is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil and editor of its site. She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-four books, two special-edition journals, and several peer-reviewed articles (https://bialabate.net).
This talk will be recorded and immediately available for rewatch for all attendees.
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