About the Psychedelics in Society and Culture Program
Psychedelics in Society and Culture is an initiative jointly housed at UC Berkeley and Harvard that will foster collaboration both within and between the two universities, to spark innovative, creative, and interdisciplinary research.
The new initiative funds projects on psychedelics by undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The grant program aims to deepen our understanding of psychedelics, their implications for the human experience, their histories, their cultural contexts and resonances, and their significance for society.
Much research on psychedelics to date has focused on their important potential for therapeutic applications. This new grant program supports collaborations at the intersections of psychedelics and humanistic inquiry, rather than the clinical investigation of psychedelics.
The program aim is to support research into the role of psychedelics across diverse histories, cultures, and geographies. Our hope is that this grant will produce work vital to both institutions’ growing psychedelics programs as well as the burgeoning field of psychedelics as a whole.
Grants range from $1,000 to $65,000, depending on the activity’s scope and scale.
Please note: Applications for 2024 funding have now closed. The inaugural cohort of Flourish fellows and scholars will be announced in early May, 2024.
At UC Berkeley, the program will be launched by the new Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) in collaboration with the new Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI). At Harvard, the Mahindra Humanities Center will act as a central, accessible forum and convening authority for the effort in collaboration with the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The initiative will establish an interdisciplinary committee of peer reviewers to select finalists from a diverse pool of candidates who respond to a Request for Proposals circulated across each campus. The two campuses will collaborate on joint events.
At UC Berkeley, this initiative is supported by generous funding from the Flourish Trust.