Community, credibility, and care: Activist public relations in the Portuguese psychedelic field
Public relations inquiry May 19, 2026 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1177/2046147x261454380 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Activist public relations in Portugal's psychedelic movement builds legitimacy through a carefully orchestrated sequence of online and in-person activities. The movement uses predictable timing, privacy safeguards, harm-reduction messaging, and a non-promotional tone to establish credibility. Place-based framing and selective partnerships root the movement in Portuguese public life while avoiding direct treatment provision. This choreography of pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event documentation allows testimony to function as public reason rather than spectacle, widening credible voice while bounding exposure.
Study at a glance
| Design | qualitative single-case design |
|---|---|
| Population | Portugal-based node of the contemporary psychedelic movement |
| Key finding | Legitimacy in activist public relations is built through a hybrid choreography of pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event afterlives, sustained by temporal anchoring and narrative care informed by ethics of care. |
Abstract
This article theorises how activist public relations operates within a Portugal-based node of the contemporary psychedelic movement. Drawing on agonistic and critical public relations, legitimacy is approached as a situated and contested accomplishment through which credibility and epistemic authority are negotiated in practice. Using a qualitative single-case design, the study analyses a comprehensive website corpus ( N = 313) and four role-central interviews. Findings demonstrate a hybrid choreography that coordinates pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event afterlives. This choreography is sustained through temporal anchoring (cadence, cycles, annual anchors) and narrative care informed by ethics of care, including privacy safeguards, harm-reduction framing, and a deliberately non-promotional tone. Place-framing and selective partnerships further root claims in Portuguese publics and enable adjacent legitimacy while maintaining clear boundaries against treatment provision. The article contributes by specifying how place-based community infrastructure is sustained through hybrid and temporal repertoires, and by showing how care-oriented curation can widen credible voice while bounding exposure so that testimony functions as public reason rather than spectacle. Practically, the findings suggest designing communication as a sequenced arc from outreach and reminders to convening and documentation, followed by resource-oriented recaps, supported by predictable rhythms and explicit privacy and harm-reduction protocols.