Claudia Gertraud Schwarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Austria. She holds an M.A. in media studies and a doctoral degree in sociology (both from the University of Vienna). Claudia’s research focuses on the sociopolitical dynamics and ethical dimensions of (re-)emerging scientific fields and technologies, the role of psychedelics and other healing modalities in society, gender studies and feminism, and the entanglements of science, spirituality, and art. She also works as science communicator and seeks to change society for the better through her activism such as the #WeDoSTS movement that she started in the field of Science, Technology, and Society studies.
Colloquium Presentation: 26 January 2024
In this session we will launch Critical Psychedelic Studies, co-edited by Dr Claudia Gertraud Schwarz and Professor Christine Hauskeller, an edited Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, published 21 Dec. 2023.
Then Claudia will give her talk on
Title: Turning the lenses of science, technology, and society studies on psychedelics – and vice versa
Science, technology, and society (STS) studies is an interdisciplinary research field that has grown and institutionalized itself since the last decades. STS scholars have developed critical lenses to question unidirectional and progress-oriented narratives of scientific knowledge production and technological development. A plethora of often detailed STS case studies have shown that science is not just impacting society, but that society always equally shapes science. In this talk I interweave two storylines to demonstrate this point and embody a reflexive standpoint. First, I present the STS-informed perspective I developed to study and intervene in the re-emergence of psychedelics in society—representing a more “official” storyline of knowledge production. I highlight the main conceptual moves and empirical insights of my research and its connections with STS traditions. Second, I interweave this “official” storyline with my more “personal” storyline of how engaging with psychedelics and the various communities assembled around them encouraged me to turn my critical lenses back on the STS research community. In this storyline, my character transforms from a “patient” suffering from the effects of adverse childhood experiences into an “activist” researcher speaking her feminist truth to power. I use my own story to illustrate the long and winding paths of healing movements expressed in specific entanglements of science, society, and the somatic, thus troubling promissory narratives of contemporary psychedelic as well as STS research.