Collaborating with Plants: Amazonian Plant Diets and Interspecies Research

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 Laura Dev, PhD in conversation with Chacruna's Executive Director Bia Labate, PhD. Together, they will discuss how plant diets can strengthen plant-human communication and can be used to guide collaborations with plants in research. We will learn more about Dr. Laura Dev’s experiences with the Shipibo practice of dieting plants, ongoing interspecies research, and the contrasts between Westerners and researchers’ relationship towards plants versus Indigenous relations. This is sure to be a fascinating conversation that will explore how connecting with plants and plant spirits can help to transform our own understanding of ourselves as humans.

📷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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Collaborating with Plants: Amazonian Plant Diets and Interspecies Research: A Conversation with Laura Dev and Bia Labate